18 ms·
SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up
- mbrevda1 6y agoSpeed is variable, capacity can be improved. The bigger question re Starlink is latency, which this test doesn't show.
- iso947 6y agoLatency to where? One of the promises of starlink is reducing latency over mid distance - say transatlantic or even across the states, due to using vacuum rather than fibres. Will be interesting how HFT use it. Starlink network is nowhere near complete so I’d expect things to only get better (until customers start piling on)
- Zr40 6y agoWhy would HFT even consider using it? They are located as close as possible to the exchange they operate on, not across states or halfway across the world.
- moonbug 6y agoarbitrage
- yeahoo 6y agoorbitRage
- guywhocodes 6y agoGeographically distributed arbitrage?
- konschubert 6y agoArbitrage between multiple exchanges requires data to go from exchange A to exchange B as fast as possible. Light in vacuum is faster than light in fiber.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raducu 6y agoLight in vacuum is only faster if it goes in a straight line from point A to B, not if it zig-zags across 50 satellites.
- emteycz 6y agoHow could zigzagging through fiber be faster thaz zigzagging through vacuum? You still need to cross nearly the same distance with fiber.
- raducu 6y agoThe fiber is a fixed geometry. The satellite mesh is not, a straight line from point A to point B is not possible most of the time, given the number of satellites available and range of laser communication in space.
- iso1210 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU is an animation of how it's supposed to work, including latencies There are enough satelites and low enough routing on the lasers to mean packets will arrive from London to NY faster than even a great-circle fibre. In reality how much bandwidth is available is a function of money, and HFTs tend to have a lot of money.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- filleokus 6y agoBut if you can access to information from an exchange halfway across the world faster than others, you can definitely trade on that.
- de_watcher 6y agoAnd if you can break the speed of light, you don't need a second exchange.
- garmaine 6y agoIt’s quite easy to “break” the speed of light in fiberoptic glass.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- de_watcher 6y agoBut it's not that useful even if you pour a glass cube over the whole exchange to slow it down.
- peteretep 6y ago> It’s quite easy to “break” the speed of light in fiberoptic glass. I don’t understand this, why? Does light travel faster than the speed of light in fibre optic glass?
- Dylan16807 6y ago"the speed of light in fiberoptic glass" is the thing being broken.
- Torkel 6y agoSame stock is listed in more than one place, and also e.g. stock movements in NY affect stocks in London. There are undersea cables built for this purpose: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a7274/a-transatlantic-cable-to-shave-5-milliseconds-off-stock-trades/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
- eecc 6y agoWhat a waste of human ingenuity. And I thought ad-tech was bad enough
- unishark 6y agoThat is true for much of the finance field.
- emteycz 6y agoActually it's not. There are objective benefits to society that you simply ignore.
- piva00 6y agoAs there are objective downsides that we, collectively, are ignoring right now. Financial capitalism shouldn't be praised, at the very best it's a lesson, we got useful tools out of it and that is all.
- arijun 6y agoThey make trades at one exchange based of prices at another. For that reason there has been a lot of microwave relays set up between New York and Chicago, for example. Starlink could reduce latency from New York to London, another important center of trade.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoLight travels 47% slower in a fiber optic cable than it does in the vacuum of space. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 (the whole video is worth watching, but that timestamp answers your specific question.
- raducu 6y agoToo lazy to watch it -- does it take into account the multiple criss-crossing satellite hops? I watched it -- no it doesn't :) It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation. So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics. But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
- endogui 6y agoHFT have installed microwave relays between Chicago and New York and between London and Berlin to arbitrage on the 47% fiber optic delay between the exchanges. A LEO satellite relay serves the same purpose. I can see London to New York, New York to Tokyo fiber connections being superceded by LEO satellite.
- zhte415 6y agoQuite surprised why LEO for cross exchange arbitrage was not already done. Microwaves were not super with weather conditions the last time taking an arbitrary interest.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoLEO sat constellations that are low enough to beat existing solutions need to be almost global to provide reliable communication anywhere.
- kaliszad 6y agoIf you mean Deutsche Börse AG, than that would be Frankfurt am Main and not Berlin which is a slight difference of about 400 km. Frankfurt to London is actually a shorter distance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges
- Torkel 6y agoIf I understood it correctly Starlink doesn't send between satellites yet, only sat<->ground. Sat<->sat is a big point of starlink and when they roll that out the latency should go down, especially for starlink<->starlink comms I imagine.
- iso947 6y agoYes that’s a few more years before then, and the more sats the more capacity and the lower the latency.
- raducu 6y agoWhat is the lifetime of a SpaceX satellite? Judging from their high launch cadence, it seems satellite-satellite communication was just a means to excite the fanboys and motivate their employees, the same way the peddle the Mars stuff.
- taneq 6y agoI 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 connection.
- Havoc 6y agoCurrent satellites are in a much higher orbit
- Torkel 6y agoThis is a good question, I see three main reasons but I may miss something: 1. Hop count is not one on the ground to go same distance. 2. Speed of light is significantly faster in vacuum. 3. The path is potentially straighter for longer distances.
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- the8472 6y agoThey need sat-sat links for that, I think the current generation of starlink doesn't have that so initial customers will not see that kind of benefit, their data will be bounced back to a ground station from the same satellite.
- tsherr 6y agoI'd assume latency from endpoint to satellite back to terrestrial base station. I can get satellite Internet right now with 40Mbps down / 5 up, but the latency is 800 to 1000 ms, so it's slow.
- dstick 6y agoI saw these Starlink speed test results 2 weeks ago: https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/filters:strip_icc():strip_exif()/i/2003786186.jpeg?f=imagenormal https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/fil... Seems like pretty solid latency :)
- gertrunde 6y ago30-100ms is better than I feared, and should be generally reasonable for most uses.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago30 is really good actually. At least for what I’m used to.
- kalleboo 6y agoOn my home fiber, pretty much all sites I visit are like 80 ms away, Starlink would be an upgrade for me, latency-wise
- j-krieger 6y agoanything above 100 ms is starting to get into unusable territory for quite a few applications
- capableweb 6y agoCount 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 longer. Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have. 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.
- kumarvvr 6y agoThis is amazing. I know there will be latency issues, but for majority of web browsing, videos, etc, it shouldn't matter. We are entering the era of spacenet and the future looks bright. Imagine having devices as small as phones or set-top boxes that can directly access internet using satellites. It would lead to a revolution in many industries.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moritonal 6y agoCould you expand on which industries will be improved? My normal life is covered entirely by 4G, with 5G now appearing. I guess you mean things like internet on planes, shipping internet, off-shore rigs? But what things can't they do at the moment because of prohibitorily slow/costly satellite internet?
- Torkel 6y agoHere's one: Teleoperation / autonomy in remote areas. Forestry. Mining. Not sure how big this, objectively speaking money-wise, but for teleop/autonomy it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth.
- qayxc 6y ago> it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth But there won't be. Not with Starlink at least. Even at their envisioned full constellation size of 40000 satellites, coverage won't be 100%. The Arctic and Antarctic regions won't have any coverage at all, for example.
- Thlom 6y agoAlready being done with existing satellite services. Starlink is cool and al, but satellite internet isn't new. Both forestry, mining and farming is utilising existing satellite services for monitoring and operations. Starlink is better than all existing services, but with some drawbacks. Like it will be really expensive to provide service in really remote areas until sat to sat relay is possible as there must be a ground station within 500 km radius of the satellite. This means that to provide service in the Amazonas SpaceX will have to build ground stations in the Amazonas. To provide service in the Pacific and Atlantic SpaceX will have to deploy several floating ground stations in the middle of the oceans. Again, not taking anything away from Space X. Starlink is really cool and will be a wake up call for the satcom industry, but satcom is not a new thing and Starlink have significant drawbacks for the time being.
- mollusca 6y agoThe true question is: may I be able to play an online video game in the deep Sahara before the modern human civilization collapses?
- eru 6y agoDepends on what latencies you can tolerate.
- baq 6y ago50ms ping should be reasonable for most games. whippersnappers who complain about 20ms ping should watch some quakeworld or quake 3 cpma where this dude rat used to destroy everyone on 300ms.
- rkangel 6y agoOn some games (Rainbow 6: Siege being the one I'm most familiar with) latency actually helps you, as the enemy has an out of date picture of where you are.
- de_watcher 6y agoYes, in Natural Selection 2 you can't properly ambush anyone unless you take into account the ping and jump on them before you even see each other.
- chucky 6y agoThat's an unfair comparison though. Everyone used to play with high latency. There's a clear advantage to you if your ping is 20 ms and mine is 300 ms. Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to. Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
- adventured 6y ago> That's an unfair comparison though. Everyone used to play with high latency. I played a lot of Quake and that was not remotely close to being the case. There were the high ping and low ping players, with not much of a % inbetween. In 1996-1997 the vast majority of people were playing Quake online via dial-up modems. The best players had low pings and were playing over ISDNs or better (a lot of players were on fast university or corporate networks). > today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago. The pro-level players in the later half of the 1990s were as elite as anything that exists today in the FPS space. They were playing like it was a job even when it wasn't, and they had been doing it for a while (Doom LAN competitions were common before that). Quake clans were prolific. They also had professional caliber competitions / tournaments back then, see: the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament in Atlanta, where Dennis Fong won Carmack's Ferrari.
- autosharp 6y agoAnd this time it is literally down / up !
- capableweb 6y agoWe're already doing literally down/up as your traffic goes from your computer on a above-ocean-level altitude, into the ground, eventually probably into the ocean floor and then up into some other building (at least considering transocean traffic)
- temptemptemp111 6y agoI'm amazed that millions of supposed engineers believe this signal is coming from satellites and not terrestrial antennas.
- Voliokis 6y agoHave they said anything about pricing yet? This would seem like a decent solution for roaming data during travel too.
- Acinyx 6y agoNothing specific, I think they are still figuring that out, but Gwynne Shotwell, the president of Spacex, is hinting a bit I think with: > Shotwell said millions of people in the U.S. pay $80 per month to get “crappy service.” She didn’t say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity.
- drusepth 6y agoYeah, the last mile is huge. My parents have paid between $100 and $200 per month for the last decade to get metered Internet that's worse than this.
- abafazi 6y agoI'm not sure if you can take that testmy.net source for granted. It mis-reported my "internet" speed by about 30Mbps. I get around 50Mbps on fast.com and speed.cloudflare.com - those two speedtests are enough for me to consider it "internet" speed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- praveen9920 6y agoCan 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?
- lmm 6y ago> 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 there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled? Each satellite only has so much bandwidth. So the more people using it in the same area, the worse it's going to get. In theory they'll add more satellites as needed, but it's never going to be much good for towns/cities. > What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US? Ground stations and regulations. Once they have satellite-satellite communications running the ground stations become less of an issue (though there's a latency penalty if your signal has to go a long way round the satellites before getting to the ground).
- MayeulC 6y agoWell, 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?
- realchucknorris 6y agowondering how many down-link stations they have. this will be v. interesting when it comes to latency vs current solutions.
- porker 6y agoThis is only a few Mbps slower than my Fibre-to-the-Cabinet broadband in the UK provides. And I'm living in a town; plenty of rural areas are much slower.
- breakfastduck 6y agoIt's actually marginally faster than mine - UK town in the north also.
- reallydontask 6y agoI'm in a VM cabled area, so the I get ~ 100/10 Mbps and ~ 12 ms ping. This is the second lowest tier that VM offer btw
- porker 6y agoThey put in VM 2 years ago - and missed off the suburb in which I and 2k others live. I'm not holding my breath... but I had VM before I moved here, and prefer the BT-network service to it.
- kome 6y agoI prefer a clean sky and earth telescopes to work instead of 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up. see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02480-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02480-5
- de_watcher 6y agoI prefer an orbital ring already across the entire sky.
- benbristow 6y agoI'm sure you do, Chief.
- Acinyx 6y agoYeah it sucks, but I think it is kind of inevitable that someone was going to do this, and even Iridium had similar problems. Now that we have at least 3 companies pouring in serious money, it seems likely that the economics will keep pushing for it. My hope is that this will lower the cost of access to space with another magnitude, which should allow a serious scale up of the amount of astronomy done from space.
- 0-_-0 6y agoI don't think SpaceX would break Earth satellites. Isn't it trivial to remove a light streak from a picture? Satellites were a problem before SpaceX and I'm sure it's 1 click in some software astronomers use. The surface area of a streak of light must be less than 1% of the total surface area so virtually no information is lost. If you use multiple exposures it's even less. Seriously, an astronomer who can't deal with this problem should just give back their PhD. The idea that humanity should be prevented from extending internet access to the entire planet because an astronomer finds it too inconvenient to click a button is example of entitled behaviour on a scale I've never encountered in my life.
- kaliszad 6y agoI would also be glad, if you could just look at the sky and don't be disturbed by satellites and air and light pollution. I think, SpaceX and others will eventually manage to make the satellites less or mostly not disturbing. But lets face it, SpaceX actually enables better professional astronomy because launching a telescope into space is now much more affordable. Also all those remote locations, where normal earth based astronomy still kind of works will have a usable internet connection to transfer the results e.g. for computation and further instructions. Also scientists will be able to e.g. video-talk home which should make these long trips into nowhere more socially acceptable in their respective families. I can imagine, that would make some of that research more surmountable.
- zhte415 6y agoFantastic. I'm keenly curious on how this will work with national regulations. Having a single global ISP is very attractive on the surface and that's with the huge caveat on monopoly, but as an additional option. I'm just not sure how this will interact with some nations' policy/restrictions. Looking at this aspect very much.
- de_watcher 6y agoYes, need multiple ISPs so the national restrictions would cancel each other.
- AdmiralGinge 6y agoIt's going to be very interesting for me. I plan to live on a sailing yacht and travel the world permanently, StarLink will make my working options a lot more flexible. Presently people are forced to see out their contracts over potentially dodgy marina WiFi. The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think, for example if you're in international waters, connected to the internet by a global ISP whose infrastructure is also outside of territorial limits then whose regulations do you have to comply with (besides your clients)? What's stopping the likes of Google poaching the concept of Radio Caroline, planting a datacentre somewhere in the North Sea and raising a two-fingered salute to any sort of data protection laws?
- Havoc 6y ago>The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think I think it'll be OK. Cellphone roaming works just fine for example
- AdmiralGinge 6y agoTrue, but cellular infrastructure is definitively in someone's territory. If I stick a phone mast up I'm still subject to things like planning permission even if the signal crosses a border. As far as I'm aware, space is pretty similar to international waters in that nobody is sovereign there. It could lead to a bit of a "wild west" situation with governments giving themselves extraterritorial powers. In the late 1980s the British government gave itself very draconian powers to conduct armed raids on radio ships in international waters for example, they take a really dim view of information outside of state control even if they're not the state controlling it.
- tumetab1 6y agoFYI On this site if you press "I do not accept" on the privacy pop-up it it redirects you to another page.
- junga 6y agoAnd hitting the back button sends you to the linked page.
- anthony_r 6y agoThe bigger question is what's the total capacity that is shared by a single neighborhood/city. For example - does this mean that a small city can only use 42Mbps down across all receivers?
- apatheticonion 6y agoThis is already better than most of Australia's internet
- kinleyd 6y agoHas pricing been indicated anywhere? Edit: See https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starlink-heres-how-much-it-will-cost-to-subscribe https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starlink-heres-how... and https://www.zdnet.com/article/spacex-starlink-internet-prepares-for-beta-users/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/spacex-starlink-internet-prepa... So about $80 pm. That's pretty good imo.
- bencollier49 6y agoIf this provides unfiltered internet to regimes which dislike it, will we see them blowing satellites out of orbit?
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoNo, 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.
- Slikey 6y agoI 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?
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agohttps://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/ConstitutionAndConvention.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/ConstitutionAndConventi... If SpaceX violates ITU policy they risk their licenses globally. A black market for this service is not possible. The equipment necessary to confirm SpaceX is transmitting into an area, or to radiolocate the ground stations themselves costs a few grand. Even low income nations can afford to monitor and enforce spectrum requirements if they desire to. But more fundamentally, this is not a goal of SpaceX or Elon. The projection of "hero" onto him and this project is out of control. Elon is doing this to make money, plain and simple.
- qayxc 6y agoIt's much easier to simply block payments to Starlink. Can't use a service that you have no method of paying for...
- wopwops 6y agoThis is already better than anything I can get (rural NZ). Any info on service tiers and pricing?
- davewasthere 6y agoSo much better than the best wired connection I can currently get here in Aus... Awesome!
- fsiefken 6y agoIs there a way to use this on the go, battery powered? I wonder if it would be a good alternative to using 4g or 5g networks. How does it work indoors? Does the antenna/receiver need line of sight?
- qayxc 6y agoIt requires line of sight and doesn't work indoors. It also can't be an alternative to cell networks since the antenna is huge and heavy compared to phones, requires LOS and needs to follow the satellites [1]. [1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/articles/GMnpPBg_1600x.jpg?v=1592627003 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/articles/GM...
- blickentwapft 6y agoLast time I mentioned latency all the fanboys squealed about how latency isn’t a problem any more with low orbit satellites. Whatever.
- capableweb 6y agoJust as a heads up, you'll be downvoted, not because you're mentioning latency, but because your comment is low effort and basically complaining about discussions in a place where discussions are kind of the point. Is there any new information about latency since before that you want to expand on?
- blickentwapft 6y agoCause with satellite is ALL about latency. It’s THE topic. Most comments here will reference it. It’s a critical issue. It doesn’t go away.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoYou have a point. At 550k off the deck, my house to Los Angeles isn't that much closer via satellites link that terrestrial fibre, maybe a few hundred kilometres.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoBut by the existing evidence, the latency seems to be fine: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i8n1s5/here_is_a_summary_of_the_recently_found_starlink/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i8n1s5/here_is_a_...
- capableweb 6y agoIf you check out the comment I made earlier, I'm very aware of that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291548) But it's more interesting if we discuss the latency itself, rather than complaining about previous discussions around the latency. As it seems right now, the latency is more than alright, at least for people who are used to really shitty latency. Sure, it's not gonna replace your home connection if you live in-or-near a city, but for the rest of us, it's much better than what was offered before.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoStarlink blah blah blah. Wait till the service is massively over subscribed and get back to me. With any luck Starlink operators (Elon Musk?) won't let that happen, but it does tend to be the way of things. Additions, the unintended consequences haven't revealed themselves fully yet. One thing I personally dislike about electricity, cable internet, and fibre optic, is what they do to the visual appeal of the built environs. Could be underground, but only areas missed that boat. Not saying the trade-offs, if any, won't be worth it though.
- ezoe 6y agoPeople talk about latency but what about packet loss?
- eric4smith 6y agoPeople always complain about Latency. But Latency to where? And is latency in Asia or the Caribbean or anywhere else outside of North America that bad? Nah. In 2020, latency from almost every continent is good enough for 99.99% of use cases. Good enough that I can sit here in Bangkok and use Vim all day remotely into servers in Texas without any difficulty. Starlink will be awesome for the majority of the world. Even "gamers" (if the pricing is good).
- jfindley 6y agoI 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 latency caused real problems, even on "good" days when you could get close to 100ms on some of the better links. In short, 100ms latency (taken from another thread) is definitely enough to cause problems for many games, and would also make things like stadia/geforce now/playstation now not viable. This doesn't mean it's not useful tech - I can think of many useful applications, but I don't think we can just handwave away all the cases where 100ms of latency might, actually, cause an issue.
- nopcode 6y agoStarlink aims to achieve sub 20ms latency. This is OK for gaming, especially with modern shooters.
- jfindley 6y agoDo 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.
- capableweb 6y agoWhile 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.
- y04nn 6y agoThis is easy to have a lot of bandwidth when you only have 10s of users, but when the bandwidth will be shared between 10000 users will it plummet? I remember when 4G was new and only few user where using it, it was very fast, but when more users arrived on the spectrum, the bandwidth per user decreased and the latency incised.
- alias_neo 6y agoI have been on EE 4G in central London (Westminster) for several years now while at work. A speed test back when it was new would get me 85/85 Mb, these days, with a much more capable device, I am lucky if I get 15/30 Mb (download is being taxed more). It's not horrific, but it's a far cry from what I was advertised when I started. I guess I'll just upgrade to their 5G plan and start the cycle again sigh
- londons_explore 6y agoI think they throttled all users to get them to pay for their "double speed" plan upgrade.
- alias_neo 6y agoI've asked them this outright, several times and they've always denied it. They deny any throttling.
- lazharichir 6y agoSame. EE 4G in CENTRAL LONDON with a SIM-card Home Router and the speeds are horrific — mostly 5Mb, and maybe 15Mb for an hour or two each day. Used to be consistently 50Mb+ back in the days.
- Aeolun 6y agoIs 15Mbit really such a horrible speed? For a mobile device I think that’s still great.
- fock 6y agoanyone know, what happens if some of these satellites fail and are uncontrollable (which is bound to happen at some point)
- sidcool 6y agoMay be silly question, but why is the up so low compared to down?
- brendawalsh 6y agoI actually have DSL and it is similar, not speed, but asymmetry. 12 Mbps down and 768kbps up, almost 20 to 1 ratio. Most ‘consumers’ download more than they upload.
- perryizgr8 6y agoThey must have provisioned less spectrum to uplink. Usually people want more downlink, less uplink. Symmetric services exist, but are usually offered as a "pro" or enterprise solution.
- nraynaud 6y agowhat's the current status of the constellation? are there moments where the network is down because there are no satellites overhead or is the thing already big enough that some part of the world are covered all the time?
- danw1979 6y agoI'm eagerly awaiting reports from beta users about the length of downtime during antenna repositioning and handover to another satellite. Hopefully it's sub-second. I can't think of anything apart from a competitive gamer playing a shooter that might be intolerant of this.
- upofadown 6y agoAfter installation the antenna does not move. That antenna has the capability to connect to two satellites at the same time. What would change would be the latency which would have a bit of a jump on a handover.
- brentos99 6y agoI assume that this is the only internet connection where gravity plays a part in the up/down speeds!!! :)
- apexalpha 6y agoSo I guess companies will now fill the entire global sky with thousands of sats just to make up for the fact that the US government ignores rural houses when it comes to digital infrastructure? I'm sorry but how is 42Mbps worth spamming the entire nightsky with to the point that it prevent astronomers from obtaining useful data? Not even 10Mbps upload? My inlaws live in a village in France that has 70 people total. It's 25min drive to a bakery, 45min drive to anything resembling a supermarket. I'd say it's rural. They now have 16Mbps *DSL and are scheduled to get Fiber in 2021. Next village already has it. But because the American government refuses to invest in infrastructure the rest of the planet just has to accept some American company is going to put 14,000 sats in low orbit? Besides the progress this resembles I still think it's pretty strange the US government can greenlight this plan even though it has global implications.
- fulmicoton 6y agoI'm French too. France is tiny. It is not about the number of bakery you have but how far your are from the closest medium size city. Also, the satellite are not geostationary above the US. They rotate above the Earth and will bring the internet everywhere... Bringing internet to everyone in the World is nothing to sneeze at. (I agree with the last bit of the rant. It sucks that private companies can launch whatever they want in space. That is not specific to the US however.)
- sgt 6y agoBut are all villages in France like that? I doubt it. Even in Norway there are thousands of people without access to sufficiently fast broadband, and some 80k DSL customers who apparently will never get fiber at all. The proposed solution for the latter is to use 4G/5G, which comes with its own issues of course. I'd say even in well developed countries, Starlink is a nice option to have. As I understand it, the 42Mbps they see now is only going to improve as well.
- bambax 6y agoYes I think all French villages have at least super fast ADSL. The US is much larger than France of course, but whatever the reason, it's incredible and really upsetting that they can pollute the earth like this, and for the rest of eternity, just to solve a temporary domestic problem.
- turowicz 6y agoMy mom can't get broadband even though she has a house in Wrocław, a quite large city in Poland. She is using 4G internet sticks.
- LinuxBender 6y agoHas anyone tested bufferbloat yet? [1] If so, please link your results for Starlink. [1] - http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
- m-p-3 6y agoAs good as my residential ISP, though I'm using a 30/10Mbps because it suits my current needs. Why pay more?
- sunstone 6y agoThat sounds pretty good for version 0.1. More sats would make it better, as would better sats. A promising start.
- new_realist 6y agoHow many rural locations share the sky which a major metropolitan area which will clog up the satellites?