Starlink $1 pre-trial minimum bandwidth speeds revealed: 35Mbps DOWN and 5Mbps UP

[Results45]

Since releasing several rocket loads of Starlink satellites into low-earth orbit, SpaceX is now conducting pre-trial service in select service areas for $1.

 

How fast you ask? Between 35-60Mbps download and 5-18Mbps upload in it's current state:

 

• https://www.telecompetitor.com/first-spacex-starlink-satellite-broadband-speeds-revealed/
• https://www.starlink.com/

 

Definitely not going to blow any minds, but for those living in small towns and rural areas with limited, unaffordable, or non-existent internet service this might just be the ticket to upgrade from DSL.

 

I guess this means broadband internet speed is no longer a barrier to playing games on GeForce Now.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Results45
updated image link

[dalekphalm]

Just saw this on the OLF Podcast. Solid speeds, which will increase as they continue to add to the network (currently there's what... a few hundred satellites? They plan on launching thousands of them).

 

No this isn't really a replacement to a good ground connection (FTTH or FTTN), but for rural customers that can't get any wired broadband, this could be excellent for them.

[FakeNSA]

2 minutes ago, Results45 said:

How fast you ask? Between 35-60Mbps download and 5-18Mbps in it's current state:

 

Definitely not going to blow any minds, but for those living in small towns and rural areas with limited, unaffordable, or non-existent internet service this might just be the ticket to upgrade from DSL.

As a Certified Rural Internet Survivor^TM, its not about the speed, beyond like 20 mbps.

It's the latency. As in, 300+ms of ping minimum on satellite.

Even 100ms on cellular was a godsend, this will be incredible.

[Boomwebsearch]

5 minutes ago, Results45 said:

Since releasing several rocket loads of Starlink satellites into low-earth orbit, SpaceX is now conducting pre-trial service in select service areas for $1.

 

How fast you ask? Between 35-60Mbps download and 5-18Mbps in it's current state:

 

• https://www.telecompetitor.com/first-spacex-starlink-satellite-broadband-speeds-revealed/
• https://www.starlink.com/

 

Definitely not going to blow any minds, but for those living in small towns and rural areas with limited, unaffordable, or non-existent internet service this might just be the ticket to upgrade from DSL.

 

I guess this means broadband internet speed is no longer a barrier to playing games on GeForce Now.

 

Sounds interesting, although I wonder how much it would cost for initial installation of the services for the customers and if there's truly unlimited data usage (no throttling at higher data usages)?

[rcmaehl]

Download speeds good but not great; BUT Upload speeds are probably faster than 90% of the US

[TVwazhere]

3 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

 we are still limited by physical constants like the speed of light, which will have a latency in the range of tens of milliseconds. Far too slow for Geforce now.

WCCFTech: Gamers demand internet speeds father than the speed of light

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, CircleTech said:

Not true. This is satellite internet and no matter how much technology we use, satellite internet is still limited by radio waves. This means no matter what we do to try to stick the internet into space, we are still limited by physical constants like the speed of light, which will have a latency in the range of tens of milliseconds. Far too slow for Geforce now.

Personally I think that the Latency on Starlink is a little too variable for something like GeForce Now - but its damn close. As you can see from the screenshots. Ping varies from 30 to 100 ms - which are comparable to good cellular pings.

 

That ping could easily be consistently reduced to under 50 ms in the long term due to increased satellite coverage.

 

According to NVIDIA's own requirements, under 60 ms is the minimum.

1 minute ago, CircleTech said:

This is still great for heavily underserved rural areas in the US. I sincerely hope this competition encourages ISPs to remove data caps and improve speeds, as we know they absolutely have capacity to do.

Very much agreed - not just the US, but worldwide. In Northern Canada, in particular, this could be quite handy.

[BobVonBob]

Not stellar (ha!) but that's way lower ping than most satellite internet with speeds pretty close to comparable services. It'll be interesting to see if it can keep similar numbers once they move beyond trials.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, BobVonBob said:

Not stellar (ha!) but that's way lower ping than most satellite internet with speeds pretty close to comparable services. It'll be interesting to see if it can keep similar numbers once they move beyond trials.

There are apparently just shy of 600 satellites in orbit right now. By 2022 they plan to triple that number. As long as they're careful about oversubscribing, the speeds could actually increase over time.

[The King of the Undead]

better than mine.

[2FA]

8 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

This means no matter what we do to try to stick the internet into space, we are still limited by physical constants like the speed of light, which will have a latency in the range of tens of milliseconds.

?????

 

Fiber optics has the same constraint? Pretty sure you meant distance and not speed..

[Intergalacticbits]

I'm excited to see some reviews of the service when it hits the street for everyone.

My main interest is what will it be like for rural users like me.

My questions will be, can I game on it without bad lag and can I afford it. 

I've always stayed away from past satellite internet service offerings from other companies because of those things and the bad customer reviews I had read.

 

I'd love it if Linus reviewed it by taking it on a road trip to a rural small town to see how the service performs. 

I'm hoping for something good.

 

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, 2FA said:

?????

 

Fiber optics has the same constraint? Pretty sure you meant distance and not speed..

Well - it's one and the same when dealing with space.

 

BUT distance is crucial here.

 

A normal Satellite Internet satellite orbits in Geostationary orbit - that's about 35 thousand kilometres from Earth.

 

Starlink satellites orbit at ~350 km. That's ONE HUNDRED TIMES CLOSER. Which in theory could mean up to 100 times less latency.

 

350 km is far, but not that far. There are plenty of land-based servers and data centres that we connect to all the time that are farther away then that.

[Lakobrija]

These speeds are better than my home wifi. 40/5 if anyone is interested

[Franck]

2 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Starlink satellites orbit at ~350 km

350 miles. not km. it's 550km

[Teddy07]

I might be using it once I live in my trailer

[Blademaster91]

The latency is really decent, this would be amazing for rural areas and probably for those stuck with slow DSL.

[TetraSky]

If that's the speed and latency everyone can expect, this is pretty damn good.

[2FA]

12 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Well - it's one and the same when dealing with space.

 

BUT distance is crucial here.

 

A normal Satellite Internet satellite orbits in Geostationary orbit - that's about 35 thousand kilometres from Earth.

 

Starlink satellites orbit at ~350 km. That's ONE HUNDRED TIMES CLOSER. Which in theory could mean up to 100 times less latency.

 

350 km is far, but not that far. There are plenty of land-based servers and data centres that we connect to all the time that are farther away then that.

Good thing we're talking regular physics and not astrophysics, so space-time isn't applicable here since we're dealing with those concepts.

 

My final project for my wireless systems class during university was on Starlink so I'm well aware.

[Kisai]

37 minutes ago, Results45 said:

Since releasing several rocket loads of Starlink satellites into low-earth orbit, SpaceX is now conducting pre-trial service in select service areas for $1.

 

How fast you ask? Between 35-60Mbps download and 5-18Mbps upload in it's current state:

 

• https://www.telecompetitor.com/first-spacex-starlink-satellite-broadband-speeds-revealed/
• https://www.starlink.com/

 

Definitely not going to blow any minds, but for those living in small towns and rural areas with limited, unaffordable, or non-existent internet service this might just be the ticket to upgrade from DSL.

 

I guess this means broadband internet speed is no longer a barrier to playing games on GeForce Now.

That's actually pretty terrible latency, gaming on that would be awful. I get 4ms on DSL to local and the same 32ms to Frontier LA.

The download/upload speed might be passible for watching youtube in 4K but that's about it.

[dalekphalm]

16 minutes ago, Franck said:

350 miles. not km. it's 550km

I was mistaken. You're correct - mostly. 340 Miles (550 km) for the current satellites. However, their original plan was to have some ~7500 satellites in a lower 210 mi (340 km) orbit. I have no idea if that's still the plan.

 

Edit: Actually it does appear that they're still planning on 3 different orbits:

First: 1,584 in a 550 kilometres (340 mi) altitude shell,
Second: 2,825 Ku-band and Ka-band spectrum satellites at 1,110 kilometres (690 mi),
Third: 7,500 V-band satellites at 340 kilometres (210 mi).[35]

 

This is from their 2020 plan updates.

6 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

That "UP TO" is really important. I've recently attended to a conference and tons of people were working exactly on reducing latency in the network layer (something we could easily do with HTTP and even HTTPS), but is super hard to do with HTTP/3 + QUIC.

 

People easily forget the major advantage of fiber: you put another cable, you magically gain additional bandwidth, ad infinitum. Switching and routing become the problem (already are and will continue to be).

Of course. That's why I said "in theory". But even if the latency isn't 100 times less - even 50 times less or 10 times less is still a massive improvement from "crap and barely usable" to "comparable to cellular and some wired connections".

 

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

That's actually pretty terrible latency, gaming on that would be awful. I get 4ms on DSL to local and the same 32ms to Frontier LA.

The download/upload speed might be passible for watching youtube in 4K but that's about it.

You're exaggerating. You by no means need a 4 ms latency to play multiplayer games. 30 ms is totally sufficient. Most people have far latency ping than 4 ms.

 

Assuming you consistently got the lower range of the pings (30-40 ms), that's perfectly serviceable for general purpose use, including some online gaming (just no game streaming, most likely).

[RejZoR]

You still need a special dish to get the connection right? Or something like satellite phones have? That thick antenna? And even that would only work outside.

[dalekphalm]

Just now, RejZoR said:

You still need a special dish to get the connection right? Or something like satellite phones have? That thick antenna? And even that would only work outside.

 

See spoiler:

Spoiler

 

It's a UFO shaped dish - it looks to be about the same size as a DISH Network style dish - maybe a couple feet across.

 

You'll almost certainly need an exterior mounting point (a balcony would likely be fine), but it may be possible to mount it inside beside a large window/glass door - we won't really know until more people get their hands on them.

 

Ideally though, it would be installed onto the roof, or outside on the ground.

 

It needs line of sight to the sky - but weather shouldn't overly affect signal (obviously bad storms will have some effect).

 

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, BlueScope819 said:

I wonder what will happen if you try and GeoIP someone using Starlink

Same thing if you GeoIP anyone else - it's more or less just the Physical Address that the ISP assigns to that IP. So assuming Starlink goes through the trouble of geotagging each IP based on the account holders address, it should work the same as anywhere else.

[Kisai]

12 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

It is proved not to be terrible. Here is the guideline table of acceptable latency of different applications.

Those targets are based on research such as this one, which assesses the impact of latency on telesurgery.

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/6520222942.pdf

That is some pretty ridiculous minimum. 4 seconds per page of web browsing? 100ms has been possible for a decade, if anything websites have been getting worse by doing all this responsive html and framework cruft.

 

No, really, if you are playing an action game, 40ms is murder when your opponent has 4ms.