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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Related: Starlink Speeds Drop Significantly in the US Amid Congestion Woes

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speeds-drop-significantl...

I'm a Starlink customer. I regularly get 100+ mbps in Austin, TX and have not noticed any speed drops. If anything, it's gotten more consistently fast.

I just setup a wireless bridge this weekend for a farm that needed to stretch their starlink.

I found some interesting behaviour on start link.. Using the starlink in built speed test app I would easily get 150mbps using the ookla [1] speed test on a desktop machine I'd get no more than 55mbps and on a mobile phone I'd consistently get 20mbps slower than the desktop. ookla tells you where you're getting your speed test sent to but the starlink one doesn't... is it a speed test just to the satellite in LEO?

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/

I always use https://fast.com/ for speedtests, it's hosted by Netflix (I rarely use the Starlink app after initial setup). I checked just now and clocked 71 Mbps, 160 Mbps, and 120 Mbps on 3 different runs.

Running the Starlink app, it's clocking 108 Mbps (within same range reported by Netflix).

Just tried speedtest.net and clocked 152 Mbps.

Sometimes speed can drop temporarily when satellites fall out of range, so I would try multiple times over a 2-3 minute window to get a more accurate average.

Because it is not intended for dense populated areas. The point of Starlink is to serve the underserved.

Totally. But revenue and profit expectations don’t align with it.

Underserved areas are like 98% of the earth’s surface and include some rather wealthy entities like airlines, shipping/logistics, mining and resources, cruise liners, billionaire’s yachts, and of course governments of small/island countries.

And all of that adds to maybe 100k customers. What next? Especially for a service that has scale bandwidth everywhere across the world, it increase it in one spot (or add 5G tower there, which you can just do, without this whole “10k satellites that have to be replaced every few years” business).

I’m not saying there’s no market. But it’s very limited. Much more limited compared to all the hype it’s getting. I had literally people living in SF telling me how they’ll use it, to stop dealing with Comcast.

> And all of that adds to maybe 100k customers.

They literally already have far more then that and they have only just started. They don't even have full coverage yet and have only just launched their mobile products and only just started their shipping products.

Airplane and shipping industry isn't even really onboard yet, there is a huge costumer base there.

The military, NASA and many other government organizations, has lots of uses for it as well. And that goes for other nations equivalence of those organizations as well (except maybe military depending on US policy on that).

> “10k satellites that have to be replaced every few years” business

Every generation the sats will get vastly better thus increasing the capacity and/or decreasing the price. At the same time the rocket technology gets vastly better decreasing the price considerably. This first iteration is by far the most expensive one.

> And all of that adds to maybe 100k customers.

Those 100k customers are not like the others. Commercial, government, and military customers will pay FAR more per connection than an everyday customer.

This isn’t even getting into backhaul, assuming the laser links work out. There are financial firms that would hand over untold stacks of cash for even a few ms of performance improvement between say, London and NYC. And Starlink can do that between all sorts of distant city pairs.

Surprising absolutely no one who understands networking.

The ludicrously high speeds that were praised during the limited beta really seem like they were designed to be a bait and switch to get people on board with completely unrealistic expectations for a full fledged satellite internet service.

It seems to be surprising Starlink; they're still telling customers they should expect speeds far above what we're getting in practice. Their service description is a fiction.

https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1002-69942-69?r...

> they're still telling customers they should expect speeds far above what we're getting in practice

That's Musk's MO, isn't it? "Full self driving", Mars by 2022...

They certainly do some genuinely cool stuff, but meeting promises like this isn't one of them.

Yes its amazing that a company that is deploying more infrastructure every week thinks that the capacity of their infrastructure will go up. Crazy that they think that.

You make it sound like they are being extremely misleading, and yet the page you linked to has this text in bold:

> Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of Services are not guaranteed. Actual speeds will likely be lower than the maximum speeds during times of high usage. Starlink may temporarily reduce speeds if our network is congested.

They've adjusted that language (and target speeds) several times without altering the price in the US. Also it's deceptive to publish a bunch of speeds and then say "lol just kidding you won't get that".

Of all the numbers the most fictitious is the 20-40ms latency. I've averaged 55ms for the last month and it's basically been that way since February 2022. The variance is wild too, 25-150ms is common.

At least starlink publishes expected service speeds somewhere [1]

Xfinity provides "800-1200 Mbps service" in many areas and they don't even mention upload speeds. You can expect less than 50 Mbps for areas, though their official press will advertise "eligible xFi Complete customers can receive up to 5–10x faster upload speeds" [2].

[1] https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1002-69942-69

[2] https://www.xfinity.com/hub/internet/faster-upload-speeds

I have Starlink and have been using it since last year. It’s true, the speeds have gone down during peak hours. I get maybe 100Mbps instead of 250-300. And I see speeds back in the 200s off-peak.

But damn, Bait and Switch? Harsh words for extremely usable high speed Internet from Space that’s fast enough for remote working, online games, zoom, and 4K streaming that works extremely well from a good portion of the Earth. Compared to “satellite internet” of the past it’s a similar technological leap as dial up was to cable internet. I don’t know how people can complain.

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