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SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

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Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#141

Post by jfindley »

gertrunde wrote: post #21
dstick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw these Starlink speed test results 2 weeks ago: https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/fil... Seems like pretty solid latency :)

30-100ms is better than I feared, and should be generally reasonable for most uses.

Consistent 30ms would be pretty excellent, and make it useful for many things. Consistent 50ms, similarly. It starts to get a bit more of an issue at 80ms or 100ms, but my worry is more that jitter may be huge, and 30-100ms is a huge jitter window that could limit usefuless not just for games, but also many other things such as voice calls.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#142

Post by fastball »

lultimouomo wrote: post #101
taneq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this is meant to lower the latency. Currently: ground satellite ground With satellite links: ground satellite satellite ground How can the latter possibly be faster? Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink con…

Currently: ground satellite ground ground With satellite links: ground satellite satellite ground i.e. the sat-to-sat link should be faster than the ground-to-ground link, on the basis that light transmitted in vacuum goes faster than light transmitted in glass. That's the theory at least.

Plus they're transmitting in a straight line without a lot of switches in between.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#143

Post by MayeulC »

lmm wrote: post #62
praveen9920 wrote: post #47

Can someone explain the physical layer aspects of starlink? Is the spectrum same as mobile data spectrum or does it work with different part of spectrum. If it is different part, do we need specific hardware to receive and transmit? Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled? What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?

> Can someone explain the physical layer aspects of starlink? Is the spectrum same as mobile data spectrum or does it work with different part of spectrum. If it is different part, do we need specific hardware to receive and transmit? Almost certainly has its own slice of spectrum. You need a pizza-box sized antenna set up, so it's not quite person-portable yet, but not too bad for installing on a vehicle. > Are ther…

Well, I would add that both satellite and ground receiver have phased arrays antennae. These allow emitting multiple focused beams simultaneously.

Since the angular resolution of these beams is limited, they each cover a fixed ground area (let's say 20km across). If more than one customer sits in that area, they will have to share airtime with the others.

Now, it's probably easier for the satellite to perform (time-division or other) multiplexing, since it knows how much data each node is going to receive.

I guess it's a lot more involved when it comes to sharing upload bandwidth with another client you can't see.

Anyway, this makes it easy to scale in rural areas, and pretty much a no-go for cities.

Now, a question of my own: do SpaceX satellites already have HW for sat-to-sat communication?

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#144

Post by joshxyz »

dstick wrote: post #5
mbrevda1 wrote: post #2

Speed is variable, capacity can be improved. The bigger question re Starlink is latency, which this test doesn't show.

I saw these Starlink speed test results 2 weeks ago: https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/fil... Seems like pretty solid latency :)

That's actually better than what most 3rd world countries got, oh god.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#145

Post by Slikey »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #125
bencollier49 wrote: post #94

If this provides unfiltered internet to regimes which dislike it, will we see them blowing satellites out of orbit?

No, they'll simply deny licensing of spectrum over their land area, and SpaceX will comply. This will never be some tool to counteract totalitarian governments.

I am interested in that. Are there any international treaties that force SpaceX to comply? If SpaceX has no business in totalitarian country X, do they have any way to sue SpaceX for offering service? I imagine a black market will establish to get access to starlink even if SpaceX doesn't officially sell access. Can you expand on this topic?

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#146

Post by mschuster91 »

capableweb wrote: post #42
selfmodruntime wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anything above 100 ms is starting to get into unusable territory for quite a few applications

Count yourself lucky you don't live in either South America, Africa or Asia, where +100ms latency is more common than not. Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Usually it's the fault of the application developers (or rather the infrastructure team) where they put too low timeouts for requests rather than letting the requests go for a bit longe…

> Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.

Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible.

What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is:

1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4)

2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions)

3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks

3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks

4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken

5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#147

Post by krageon »

jfindley wrote: post #141
gertrunde wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30-100ms is better than I feared, and should be generally reasonable for most uses.

Consistent 30ms would be pretty excellent, and make it useful for many things. Consistent 50ms, similarly. It starts to get a bit more of an issue at 80ms or 100ms, but my worry is more that jitter may be huge, and 30-100ms is a huge jitter window that could limit usefuless not just for games, but also many other things such as voice calls.

A 100ms ping is perfectly playable in everything except twitch-based shooters. In voice calls you will notice it, but it won't get in the way like say a 1-2s delay would (like you get if you phone from one end of the world to the other). It's really a very good result bearing in mind that this can work absolutely anywhere.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#148

Post by jfindley »

nopcode wrote: post #139
jfindley wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think putting quotes around the word gamers helps you get your point across particularly effectively - it sounds like you don't really think it's important enough of a usecase to be worthy of much consideration. Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but lat…

Starlink aims to achieve sub 20ms latency. This is OK for gaming, especially with modern shooters.

Do you have a source? A link in a different thread paints a somewhat different picture. If they can achieve stable ~20ms latency though, that would indeed be excellent.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#149

Post by capableweb »

mschuster91 wrote: post #146
capableweb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count yourself lucky you don't live in either South America, Africa or Asia, where +100ms latency is more common than not. Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Usually it's the fault of the application developers (or rather the infrastructure team) where they put too low timeouts for requests rather than letting the requests go for a bit longe…

> Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services. Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible. What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is: 1) on both ends in both d…

Yeah, in short: content-addressable systems are needed if we're ever to send data between planets on a larger scale. Systems like IPFS and alike solves this problem nicely, at least in my tests with high-latency scenarios.

Re: SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up

#150

Post by capableweb »

nopcode wrote: post #139
jfindley wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think putting quotes around the word gamers helps you get your point across particularly effectively - it sounds like you don't really think it's important enough of a usecase to be worthy of much consideration. Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but lat…

Starlink aims to achieve sub 20ms latency. This is OK for gaming, especially with modern shooters.

While latency is more important than bandwidth for most games, jitter is even more important. Lower latency is obviously better, but under what duration? If it fluctuates between 10ms and 50ms, while only being 20ms for short periods, many games will have problems with this, rather than a 50ms constant latency where the game servers can start accounting for it without issues.
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