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Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

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Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#13
While that bandwidth is impressive, I'd be interested to know what the expected packet-delays through the atmosphere are. The lowest orbit they plan to use is 340 km which translates to a minimum 2 ms delay. While the equipment will rarely align like that, even 10 ms is fine for most human use.

Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#14
post #3

"For now, Starlink internet cuts off for seconds at a time every couple of minutes" - wait, what?

So, does that mean 95% of internet users are facing even worse quality of service? or does it mean that given a very small number of participants so far, starlink is able to allocate more bandwidth to everyone? I remember reading an analysis here on a previous posting about starlink that under load, it is going to have pretty limited throughput (on top of higher latency). I do not see how that will get solved.

When 4g/LTE was new, a coworker was an early adopter of whatever cellphone that was one of the first to support it. They were getting somewhere ~250 mbps on speed test.

Fast forward to everyone having 4g phones, now in practice I see like 1-2% of those speeds typically.

I have no idea the inner workings of starlink's protocol, but these aspects of wireless seem inevitable. once theres more simultaneous connections than in limited beta, each connection gets a smaller time slice or less frequency band, no?

I do not see how its solved either.

Currently I have rural DSL, approximately 3mbps down, 1 mbps up, but cheaper and reliable. The one person who has starlink beta is posting 200+ mbps screenshots but if everyone here connects I'm skeptical the result isn't slower, less reliable, more expensive than what's already here.

Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#16
post #13

While that bandwidth is impressive, I'd be interested to know what the expected packet-delays through the atmosphere are. The lowest orbit they plan to use is 340 km which translates to a minimum 2 ms delay. While the equipment will rarely align like that, even 10 ms is fine for most human use.

They're bidding in FCC Auction 904 (currently in progress), which requires an absolute maximum round-trip latency of 100ms. Given the FCC penalties they wouldn't be bidding if they weren't damn sure they would be significantly lower than that bar.

Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#18

I'm amazed that the latency appears so low. I used satellite broadband for years here in very rural England, latency was more like 1000ms!

Geosynchronous (35,786km from surface) versus VLEO (550km from surface).

Basically the difference in altitude between your satellite and these satellites is almost three times the earth's diameter.

Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#19
post #13

While that bandwidth is impressive, I'd be interested to know what the expected packet-delays through the atmosphere are. The lowest orbit they plan to use is 340 km which translates to a minimum 2 ms delay. While the equipment will rarely align like that, even 10 ms is fine for most human use.

They're bidding in FCC Auction 904 (currently in progress), which requires an absolute maximum round-trip latency of 100ms. Given the FCC penalties they wouldn't be bidding if they weren't damn sure they would be significantly lower than that bar.

Details:

  https://auctiondata.fcc.gov/public/projects/auction904
Auction should conclude in 2-3 weeks.

Re: Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US

#20
post #13

While that bandwidth is impressive, I'd be interested to know what the expected packet-delays through the atmosphere are. The lowest orbit they plan to use is 340 km which translates to a minimum 2 ms delay. While the equipment will rarely align like that, even 10 ms is fine for most human use.

People are getting 30-40ms ping times generally. Far lower than other satellite options, as you would expect.
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