SpaceX Starlink speeds revealed as beta users get downloads of 11 to 60Mbps:
Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps.
The same tests, conducted over the past two weeks, showed latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms. This isn't a comprehensive study of Starlink speeds and latency, so it's not clear whether this is what Internet users should expect once Starlink satellites are fully deployed and the service reaches commercial availability. We asked SpaceX several questions about the speed-test results yesterday and will update this article if we get answers.
[...] Beta testers must sign non-disclosure agreements, so these speed tests might be one of the only glimpses we get of real-world performance during the trials. SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.
[...] Although the Ookla speed-test latencies for Starlink don't hit Musk's target of below 20ms, they are below the FCC's 100ms threshold. For competitive online gaming, Ookla says players should be in "winning" shape with latency or ping of 59ms or less, and "in the game" with latency or ping of up to 129ms. The 35 best cities in the world for online gaming have ping rates of 8 to 28ms, an Ookla report last year said.
Latency tests are affected by the distance between the user and the server. The Ookla tests revealed on Reddit showed the tests going to servers in Los Angeles and Seattle; SpaceX's beta tests are slated for the northern US and southern Canada, but a Stop the Cap story says that testers so far are in rural areas of Washington state only.
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SpaceX Starlink brings Internet to emergency responders in wildfire areas:
SpaceX Starlink is providing Internet access to Washington state emergency responders in areas ravaged by wildfires. The group has deployed seven Starlink user terminals (i.e. satellite dishes) since it began using the service in early August, as CNBC reported yesterday:
"I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable" as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department's IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday.
Previously:
SpaceX Seeks FCC Broadband Funds, Must Prove It Can Deliver Sub-100ms Latency
SpaceX Starlink Speeds Revealed as Beta Users Get Downloads of 11 to 60Mbps
SpaceX gets FCC approval to bid in $16 billion rural-broadband auction
SpaceX is one of the 386 entities that have qualified to bid in a federal auction for rural-broadband funding.
SpaceX has so far overcome the Federal Communications Commission's doubts about whether Starlink, its low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, can provide latency of less than 100ms and thus qualify for the auction's low-latency tier. With the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) set to distribute up to $16 billion to ISPs, the FCC initially placed SpaceX on the "incomplete application" list, which includes ISPs that had not shown they were qualified to bid in their desired performance and latency tiers. The FCC also said that LEO providers "will face a substantial challenge" obtaining approval to bid in the low-latency tier because they must "demonstrat[e] to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold."
[...] SpaceX's Starlink service is in a limited beta and appears to be providing latencies well under the 100ms threshold. SpaceX still isn't guaranteed to get FCC funding. After the auction, winning bidders will have to submit "long-form" applications with more detail on how they will meet deployment requirements in order to get the final approval for funding.
The $16 billion available in the auction will be distributed to ISPs over ten years, paying all winning bidders combined up to $1.6 billion a year to deploy broadband in specified areas. SpaceX satellite service could theoretically be made available anywhere and doesn't require wiring up individual homes, so this funding won't necessarily expand the areas of availability for Starlink. But satellite operators can use FCC funding as subsidies allowing them to charge lower prices in areas that lack modern broadband access.
[...] The $16 billion in funding will be directed to census blocks where no provider reports offering home-Internet speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. The list of approved census blocks contains 5.3 million unserved homes and businesses.
See also: SpaceX, Hughes and Viasat qualify to bid for $20.4 billion in FCC rural broadband subsidies
Previously: Ajit Pai Caves to SpaceX but is Still Skeptical of Musk's Latency Claims
SpaceX Starlink Speeds Revealed as Beta Users Get Downloads of 11 to 60Mbps
SpaceX Seeks FCC Broadband Funds, Must Prove It Can Deliver Sub-100ms Latency
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 15 2020, @06:01PM (10 children)
That is complete and utter bullshit. I'm no gamer, but I'm not unfamiliar with online gaming. 59ms pings do put you in the game, but nowhere near "winning shape". Ping time of greater than 100ms results in you clicking to attack an opponent, then watching the buffer show you how he attacked you ten times before your command reached the server.
Anyone want to disagree with me, and tell us how you've won major combat challenges with ping times over 100? That would be really interesting to hear, if factual.
With all of that said, I expect that ultimately, if/when SpaceX gets all the satellites up that they want up, ping times should fall dramatically. It's still not going to compete with serious gamers in strategically located cities.
At those speeds, the most infinitesimal hiccup in your network means defeat.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Saturday August 15 2020, @06:13PM (3 children)
Most people don't play competitively.
It's just that simple.
In my gaming days, I made sure I had pings on single-digit ms.
Nowadays I game over 4G. It's not critical that I win, it's a bit of fun and I don't get trounced JUST because I have a slightly higher ping. That said my pings are in the 30-50ms range, so how this is seen as something great I don't understand. Radio to a fibre a few hundred metres away, probably the biggest latency is my wifi.
You can't game competitively on wifi. It's bursty, unreliable, and shared-spectrum. But almost everyone who ever plays a game does.
Under 100ms is more than acceptable for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of gamers. How do we know? That's what they HAVE NOW. It's been the same since the days of the very first broadband, that's why your ping tends to go red as it approaches 100ms. Otherwise it stays green. Why? Because that's what most people have and find acceptable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:02PM
Sometimes you need to skap the tadpole to see which way the legs grow, thats all this is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:05PM (1 child)
My ping time to slither.io is 74ms. I don't know if the problem is just my ping, or if the servers suck now. I used to get on leader board quite often, and I'd quit when I got bored. Now the lag is so bad that it has taken most of my best moves off the table. I take my finger off the mouse button, and half the time it's like I'm sliding across ice into an opponent and dying. It's not just that I can't win. It's frustrating because it makes me look like an idiot who straight-lined at full speed into oblivion.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:13PM
Actual humans play slither.io? I figured that I was winning cuz I figured out the moves the various bots were making. Go figure....
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2020, @06:13PM (2 children)
31, 31, 33, 42, 42, 53, 75, 94 ms in the screenshot. Outliers could be explained by pinging an Ookla node in California from Washington. And it's a beta test of an incomplete satellite network, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Adding more sats will improve things. Connecting to a satellite that is almost directly overhead could be better than one that just came over the horizon. Or the exact opposite, it could help if the sat is in between you and the nearest Starlink ground station.
1 Gbps is cool, but the intended target market might be fine with 25 Mbps if the price is right. 100 Mbps is probably the sweet spot.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:34PM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday August 17 2020, @01:14PM
I think antenna size and directivity is going to limit Starlink's usefulness in that application. According to Elon's tweet shown in this article [dailymail.co.uk], the antenna is about 1m in diameter and has motors to adjust its orientation. It's not clear if that means it performs a single adjustment on installation or if it continuously tracks sats as they fly overhead. If it's the former case, then careful installation would eliminate the need for motors. If it's the latter, then you've got a mechanical point of failure to deal with.
Either way, a 1m dish is a major pain for telemetry sites that may have limited antenna mounting infrastructure. If there's a way to use a different antenna configuration (perhaps a long boom yagi) then maybe Starlink could compete against cellular - it's hard to beat a tiny little whip antenna!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EvilSS on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:39PM
Yep, I can tell you don't actually game as you stated, or you would know the super-annoying answer to this. Most lag compensation code in games comes out favoring the person with the laggy connection. The non-laggy players end up dying behind walls while trying to fight an opponent that is rubber banding and teleporting around the map. So having a player with a high latency connection tends to actually put the rest of the lobby at a disadvantage in most online games.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:42PM
HAX!
HAX!
HAX!
You have been kicked from the server. Reason: "Nobody is hacking noob, you just suuuuuck!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:01PM
130ms of ping is definitely not getting it done for gaming. 30ms is viable, depending on exactly where you are. It takes two to ping, so you can't describe a city as having a ping time (unless you meant within the city, which nobody would).
From where I am in Denver, I have 10ms ping to 8.8.8.8 (there's one of those in most major cities, I think), and 40ms to a server in Vancouver, BC. 31ms at best is markedly worse than a normal wired connection, which from rural Washington to Seattle would be in the 10-20ms range, and worse, a fluctuating ping will confuse the game and make your experience worse than it would be. This will get the job done for web browsing and the occasional videoconference, but if you want to play games, you'll be sticking with Hearthstone.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:06PM (2 children)
The only hope for widely available, decently-priced broadband is satellite. Municipal broadband should be cheaper and faster, but Muricans being Murcans, that, too, will remain pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Let's get some genuine good thinking and r&d going on this front.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:19PM (1 child)
The target market for Starlink isn't municipal.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:22PM
If it proves successful and grows in scale, the cost will come down.
Air travel didn't start out for the lowly plebes, either.
(Score: 2) by Zinnia Zirconium on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:47PM (3 children)
Is the receiver portable? Is it battery powered? Is it small enough to fit in my handbag?
Oh wait. I don't go outside anymore because of chroma virus. Never mind?
Portability will be important eventually.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2020, @09:18PM (2 children)
It's something you could put on a boat or RV, not phone sized. But satellite-to-phone is supposedly being pursued by another company:
Megaconstellation startup raises $110 million to connect smartphones via satellite [spacenews.com]
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2020, @12:31AM (1 child)
Megastallion you say? That’s one busy girl, how’d she find time for that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XJiirJIwXQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday August 16 2020, @01:01AM
Mad Max: Fury Road energy.
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