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Comment by lupusreal

1 year ago

> "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window"

I can't figure out what this sentence means.

That any SpaceX user who has a connection established for >2h will have their data sent not via the classic path "ground - satellite - ground" at least once during the connection, but via "ground - satellite 1 - satellite 2 - ground".

I think it means pretty much all Starlink users have at least some data go over laser links every two hours. Which is a bit of surprise to me, if true. I have a year or so of fine-grained latency detail taken with IRTT on a Starlink connection, I should sit down and see if I can see times I'm using a satellite. Latency is highly variable in Starlink though so it's pretty noisy data.

  • Have you posted that data anywhere? I'm currently on a 10mbps DSL connection and considering StarLink, but have so far been scared away by the cost and concerns about latency, so I'm always on the lookout for real world data.

    • My pings roughly 60-80 no matter if I’m going to a friends server down the road or across the world. Before starlink, my rural internet would be lucky to get below 120. For what that’s worth.

  • Hey, I’m very curious if you’ve seen any improvement in latency over the past month.

    • not in the last month but I had a major improvement 11 months ago. still not clear what they did, but best guess is shifting load.