8 ms·

Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5,

Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial cablemodem DOCSIS3 segment in a randomly chosen house in a suburb somewhere, you might also see an average of 0.50% loss in many cities. For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing. The next big thing will be to see if they can really get satellite-to-satellite laser links working so that starlink service area and coverage is not limited by having multiple moving LEO satellites in line of sight of both the CPE and a regional spacex earth station at the same time. for instance if people wanted to put a working starlink terminal somewhere really difficult to reach like socotra, yemen.

arka2147483647 5y ago
Do you know if this based on some technical aspect, or simply that has Space X not yet to saturated their network capacity?
- walrus01 5y ago
  there was a 1-hour full outage at 0200 immediately preceding it. without inside info into what they're doing, I believe it's a combination of new cpe terminal firmware, satellite firmware/software loads, and more of the recently launched satellites being put into use at their intended orbits, so there's greater simultaneous satellite coverage over my area now.
gman83 5y ago
Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?
- walrus01 5y ago
  personal opinion, space is huge, and the gap between companies issuing press release and the number of companies actually implementing hardware is huge. oneweb is just now becoming barely usable above 55 degrees north latitude. they have a lot of launches to go before it's anything like a real network (and will not be for individual end user CPEs, a oneweb terminal is much bigger and more costly). other things like telesat LEO network remain in the land of vaporware, same as with amazon's.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." (RIP Douglas Adams)
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Space is hugely, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them). Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short order. Orbital debris doesn't. The probability of an initial collision is fairly low, but once you have a few, or someone decides to show off their new ASAT weaponry (which is functionally a satellite collision, just one of them only having been in space for a short while), you now have flak that won't go away, moving in all directions at orbital velocity. That, then, has the potential to start causing all sorts of problems, and once that's taken out a few more satellites with orbital-energy impacts, you start having a real problem. Will it happen? Those invested in littering certain useful orbital shells with satellites claim not. We'll see.
    - Qub3d 5y ago
      Kessler syndrome is definitely a problem. I've heard SpaceX claims to deal with it by putting their satellites in an orbit that requires periodic boosting to stay put -- if they don't, satellites decay and de-orbit after a few years. The plan is, I think, to regularly retire (de-orbit) and replace these satellites so they can continuously improve the design, and as a nice side-effect any collisions or otherwise misbehaving objects will at least stop being a problem after a known maximum span of time.
jeffbee 5y ago
Note that this would also be the observable effect of simply prioritizing ICMP while dropping other protocols. Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion window collapse, etc.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Was going to mention that a lot of ISPs de-prioritize ICMP but I get a sense that OP might be aware of that. It'd be cool to see what a long running mtr in TCP mode says about Starlink.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I'm aware, this is through the isp to endpoint destinations, not pinging intermediate hops in the starlink cgnat path to internet.
AnotherGoodName 5y ago
I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
- the_arun 5y ago
  Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Not just expensive. IIRC, the receiving dish and associated gear burns 120W or something like that.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Living with more space though, you can offset that with solar pretty easily.
    - bobsmooth 5y ago
      That's still only around $100 a year in electricity assuming 10 cents/kWh.
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        In Germany, regular prices scratch 30 cents/kWh, so you're looking at another 25€ a month just to run the dish. A regular unlimited Gigabit Uplink runs 40€-80€ a month, with hardware included and a power usage in the range of 10W. But, unfortunately, anywhere you have a Garden large enough to host starlink, you probably won't have anything near that speed available, so it's still pretty competitive. :(
  - AnotherGoodName 5y ago
gerdesj 5y ago
What's your next hop time? Mine is about 20ms at home (FTTC - Fibre to the Cabinet) Satellite links are quite phenomenal to be honest (when they work). The metrics to worry about are latency and loss and throughput. Jitter is really a SIPnRTP thing. Don't use ICMP to test for "quality" - it isn't even the same protocol that you worry about (TCP/UDP), it is what it is - ICMP (use it wisely).
- walrus01 5y ago
  the absolute minimum rtt ping i've seen to downtown seattle is 15.8ms but it's more typically like 25ms. That's keeping in mind the rtt for a ping is four one-way trips through space plus latency from the earth station in a far eastern suburb of seattle to downtown and back, by fiber. jitter is really quite consistent at 23-28ms I agree on the icmp, for me, icmp loss is really more like a cheap/easy early warning sign that something is wrong. if a properly implemented last mile connection has no icmp loss it's also unlikely anything else is wrong. if there is a few % icmp loss, very likely normal tcp and udp things will also behave badly.
Teknoman117 5y ago
That's awesome! On Starlink in Mendocino county (CA) (in the woods), I'm still dropping out for a few seconds every couple of minutes. Fine for calls, Netflix, and browsing, but most video games will boot me whenever they happen. Some streaming services seem to buffer far less than others. Disney+ seems to stop playing the moment it can't phone home. Admittedly, most of my trouble is probably caused by the 70 meter coastal redwood on the western horizon. The network isn't quite dense enough yet that I can get a satellite visible at all times amongst the trees. It's just a bit sad, as the Starlink app reports like 95% clear sky. You really do need 100%.
- walrus01 5y ago
  I agree on the trees. Mine is also at a considerably further northern latitude so the simultaneous density of overhead satellites at any point in time is quite a lot more. for people with trees they cannot cut down I see a lot more 40' aluminum light duty towers with foundation kits getting sold in the future. Much like people used to put up in very rural areas with yagi antennas on them to receive OTA TV a logn time ago. http://www.texastowers.com/towers/ss.htm http://www.texastowers.com/towers/ss.htm
- rickosborne 5y ago
  Hello from Philo! We were seeing drops of a few minutes each day, but as of December we've gone days without even the slightest interruption. We had to really work to get Dishy to not have any obstructions, but since then it's been great: https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/03110552/wm-wp-1641225946066-scaled.jpg https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01... We also have Ukiah Wireless, point to point microwave, as a backup. I use it for my work uplink as it has more stable upload bandwidth than Starlink. And when we had those really bad storms over the last few weeks, Starlink definitely struggled more than microwave.
shaklee3 5y ago
> For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing. starlink is not even close to oversubscribed, so I'm not sure why you're making this comparison.

arka2147483647 5y ago

Do you know if this based on some technical aspect, or simply that has Space X not yet to saturated their network capacity?

walrus01 5y ago
there was a 1-hour full outage at 0200 immediately preceding it. without inside info into what they're doing, I believe it's a combination of new cpe terminal firmware, satellite firmware/software loads, and more of the recently launched satellites being put into use at their intended orbits, so there's greater simultaneous satellite coverage over my area now.

gman83 5y ago

Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?

walrus01 5y ago
personal opinion, space is huge, and the gap between companies issuing press release and the number of companies actually implementing hardware is huge. oneweb is just now becoming barely usable above 55 degrees north latitude. they have a lot of launches to go before it's anything like a real network (and will not be for individual end user CPEs, a oneweb terminal is much bigger and more costly). other things like telesat LEO network remain in the land of vaporware, same as with amazon's.
stickfigure 5y ago
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." (RIP Douglas Adams)
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Space is hugely, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them). Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short order. Orbital debris doesn't. The probability of an initial collision is fairly low, but once you have a few, or someone decides to show off their new ASAT weaponry (which is functionally a satellite collision, just one of them only having been in space for a short while), you now have flak that won't go away, moving in all directions at orbital velocity. That, then, has the potential to start causing all sorts of problems, and once that's taken out a few more satellites with orbital-energy impacts, you start having a real problem. Will it happen? Those invested in littering certain useful orbital shells with satellites claim not. We'll see.
  - Qub3d 5y ago
    Kessler syndrome is definitely a problem. I've heard SpaceX claims to deal with it by putting their satellites in an orbit that requires periodic boosting to stay put -- if they don't, satellites decay and de-orbit after a few years. The plan is, I think, to regularly retire (de-orbit) and replace these satellites so they can continuously improve the design, and as a nice side-effect any collisions or otherwise misbehaving objects will at least stop being a problem after a known maximum span of time.

jeffbee 5y ago

Note that this would also be the observable effect of simply prioritizing ICMP while dropping other protocols. Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion window collapse, etc.

VectorLock 5y ago
Was going to mention that a lot of ISPs de-prioritize ICMP but I get a sense that OP might be aware of that. It'd be cool to see what a long running mtr in TCP mode says about Starlink.
- walrus01 5y ago
  I'm aware, this is through the isp to endpoint destinations, not pinging intermediate hops in the starlink cgnat path to internet.

AnotherGoodName 5y ago

I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.

the_arun 5y ago
Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Not just expensive. IIRC, the receiving dish and associated gear burns 120W or something like that.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Living with more space though, you can offset that with solar pretty easily.
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    That's still only around $100 a year in electricity assuming 10 cents/kWh.
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      In Germany, regular prices scratch 30 cents/kWh, so you're looking at another 25€ a month just to run the dish. A regular unlimited Gigabit Uplink runs 40€-80€ a month, with hardware included and a power usage in the range of 10W. But, unfortunately, anywhere you have a Garden large enough to host starlink, you probably won't have anything near that speed available, so it's still pretty competitive. :(
- AnotherGoodName 5y ago

gerdesj 5y ago

What's your next hop time? Mine is about 20ms at home (FTTC - Fibre to the Cabinet) Satellite links are quite phenomenal to be honest (when they work). The metrics to worry about are latency and loss and throughput. Jitter is really a SIPnRTP thing. Don't use ICMP to test for "quality" - it isn't even the same protocol that you worry about (TCP/UDP), it is what it is - ICMP (use it wisely).

walrus01 5y ago
the absolute minimum rtt ping i've seen to downtown seattle is 15.8ms but it's more typically like 25ms. That's keeping in mind the rtt for a ping is four one-way trips through space plus latency from the earth station in a far eastern suburb of seattle to downtown and back, by fiber. jitter is really quite consistent at 23-28ms I agree on the icmp, for me, icmp loss is really more like a cheap/easy early warning sign that something is wrong. if a properly implemented last mile connection has no icmp loss it's also unlikely anything else is wrong. if there is a few % icmp loss, very likely normal tcp and udp things will also behave badly.

Teknoman117 5y ago

That's awesome! On Starlink in Mendocino county (CA) (in the woods), I'm still dropping out for a few seconds every couple of minutes. Fine for calls, Netflix, and browsing, but most video games will boot me whenever they happen. Some streaming services seem to buffer far less than others. Disney+ seems to stop playing the moment it can't phone home. Admittedly, most of my trouble is probably caused by the 70 meter coastal redwood on the western horizon. The network isn't quite dense enough yet that I can get a satellite visible at all times amongst the trees. It's just a bit sad, as the Starlink app reports like 95% clear sky. You really do need 100%.

walrus01 5y ago
I agree on the trees. Mine is also at a considerably further northern latitude so the simultaneous density of overhead satellites at any point in time is quite a lot more. for people with trees they cannot cut down I see a lot more 40' aluminum light duty towers with foundation kits getting sold in the future. Much like people used to put up in very rural areas with yagi antennas on them to receive OTA TV a logn time ago. http://www.texastowers.com/towers/ss.htm http://www.texastowers.com/towers/ss.htm
rickosborne 5y ago
Hello from Philo! We were seeing drops of a few minutes each day, but as of December we've gone days without even the slightest interruption. We had to really work to get Dishy to not have any obstructions, but since then it's been great: https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/03110552/wm-wp-1641225946066-scaled.jpg https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01... We also have Ukiah Wireless, point to point microwave, as a backup. I use it for my work uplink as it has more stable upload bandwidth than Starlink. And when we had those really bad storms over the last few weeks, Starlink definitely struggled more than microwave.

shaklee3 5y ago

> For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing. starlink is not even close to oversubscribed, so I'm not sure why you're making this comparison.