[Starlink] speedtest.net takes a look at sat internet around the globe

[Ulrich Speidel]

On 13/08/2021 1:54 pm, David Lang wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>
> > - If we reasonably assume that the capacity of a Starlink satellite 
> needs to
> > be shared between its users, then few users / satellite equates to a 
> large
> > share of the capacity. From Starlink's front page: "Starlink is 
> available to
> > a limited number of users per coverage area at this time." Guess 
> what? What
> > we see here may not last, but it's sure great for marketing.
>
> although as they launch more satellites and implement routing between 
> satellites
> this will also expand
I would hope so, but that's a while off yet.
>
> > - Ever wondered why Starlink's bulk of beta users sits between 
> 40-something
> > and 50-something degrees of latitude? That's right, because that's 
> where you
> > get the largest concentration of satellites right now, which helps 
> keep the
> > number of users per satellite down. Elsewhere? Tough luck.
>
> the problem is having satellties overhead for continuous coverage. 
> This happened
> first a higher latitudes. I'm in the Los Angles area and according to 
> a check I
> did a couple weeks ago, there are still 15-75min/day that I would not 
> have any
> satellites available to use. 
Indeed, but for most people, it's not just that you need to be able to 
see a satellite. You need to be in range of a satellite that can also 
see a gateway, and the probability of your Dishy finding one that is 
meeting this criterion goes up with the number of satellites you can see 
and with your proximity to a gateway. As you do have two gateways in the 
Los Angeles area, this condition will be met for most satellites you can 
see, but with often hundreds of miles between gateways even in the 
continental US, the unavailability periods can be significantly larger 
for others at your latitude.
> They have launched enough satellites for global
> coverage, but the last several batches are still climbing to their 
> final orbit
> (it takes a couple months post-launch to do this)
As for overhead coverage, yes, as for connectivity, no - for lack of 
interconnects in the vast majority of the present fleet.
>
>
> bzz, your local ISP needs to transport the data to each customer 
> individually,
> multicast is not a functional thing on the Internet

Nobody is talking about multicasting here! I'm talking about content 
delivery networks, and they're very much a functional thing, and when 
they break, people will claim that "the Internet is down", as happened a 
few times over the last few months.

Much of the conventional satellite Internet into remote places (and that 
can mean entire countries) used to be backhaul to a local ISP, who would 
then distribute via WiFi, DSL, or whatever. When such ISPs are able to 
host CDN servers in their remote location data centre, then the cat 
video served by the CDN will travel across the sat link once and will be 
cached at the local CDN for multiple downloads by local users.

Direct-to-site operators such as Starlink (and yes I realise Hughes and 
Viasat do this, too, albeit via GEO) have to deliver the cat video to 
each end user through the bottleneck resource satellite.
> And with SpaceX putting ground stations on the roofs of major datacenters
> (google and others), they will have as good or better connections than 
> your
> local ISP.
>
> > But big numbers always look great, don't they?
>
> you seem to be wnting to compare starlink to gig fiber to the home or 
> something
> like that.

Well, I'm comparing it to two quite disparate things, really, so let's 
declare:

1) Gig fibre to the home indeed (which you can get here in Auckland, NZ, 
at least in most suburbs, see 
https://comcom.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/252288/MBNZ-Summer-Report-2021-13-April-2021.pdf), 
connected to the rest of the world by shared submarine fibre capacity 
roughly equivalent to Starlink's entire current global system capacity 
(including satellites over remote regions far away from gateways). 
That's a couple of dozen Tb/s and us five million plus our 20 million 
Aussie mates across the ditch like have required regular capacity 
upgrades in recent years, suggesting that we manage to work it pretty 
well. I'll see whether I can provide some speedtest.net data FYI in a 
later post.

2) The 4000 ms all up RTT GEO satellite connection that my incoming PhD 
student in Tarawa, Kiribati, is on. He'd love your sister's 
connectivity. There are a lot of islands like this in the Pacific, and 
conditions differ. Many use trunk-to-ISP satellite services, sometimes 
to competing ISPs, sometimes to a monopoly ISP. Some use GEO, some use 
O3b MEO. Some now use direct-to-site Kacific HTS GEO. Some may be within 
reach of Starlink, many won't be, and in some cases, the local regulator 
forbids competition to the monopoly telco and won't allow direct-to-site 
services. And in some places there's hope for change and in others there 
are lock-in contracts running for years into the future.

>
> My sister is the perfect example of their real target. Before I got her
> Starlink, she had the choice between dialup (with toll charges), a 
> wireless ISP
> at symmetrical 2Mb/s, or cellular based service (with a tall mast to 
> hold the
> cell antenna)
>
> starlink isn't targeted at urban areas, but if you look at population 
> density
> maps, the vast majority of the country isn't urban, and while the 
> percentage of
> population isn't as lopsided, that's still a LOT of people
Quite aware of this. There's a nice write-up here of the infrastructural 
problems you face in the US and how Starlink is really designed for that 
market 
https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review 
<https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review> 

>
> I'm in the Los Angeles suburbs and up until the time that spectrum cable
> upgraded their system a couple years ago, the best I could get (short of
> $thousands to run new wires to my house) was 10M/2M dsl. I'm going to get
> starlink as a backup, and as a portable setup that I can take when 
> traveling
> (camping, search and rescue bases, etc)
I was on DSL until about 2-3 years ago. The then government here decided 
that connectivity pretty much everywhere was a strategic investment 
must-have. They'd already split the old monopoly post office telco into 
a network and a retail arm, and invited competition. They then compelled 
(and subsidised) the network company to roll out fibre to wherever this 
was possible - for free - and make it available to ISPs for a fee set by 
the regulator. So they literally came door knocking to connect us up, at 
zero cost (except time to make sure "a foot deep" meant more than 
brushing the leaves aside). At the end of 2022, 87% of New Zealanders 
will have fibre access, two years ahead of target.

-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282

The University of Auckland
ulrich at cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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