[Starlink] A year of Starlink latency and loss metrics

[J Pan]

starlink has made great improvements for bent pipes (both the user
dish and landing ground station are seen by the same satellite) but
they still need to improve for inter-satellite links, which is an even
harder problem. how's the starlink performance in kiribati using isl
links?
--
J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan at UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan


On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 8:17 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> On 12/06/2024 4:32 pm, Tristan Horn via Starlink wrote:
>
> Not my metrics, but spotted this on Reddit and I'm always a sucker for Grafana graphs:
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1dd4wjs/i_collected_metrics_on_my_starlink_for_nearly_a/
>
> I probably have little relevant to add (I returned my Starlink terminal in 2023), but the thread inspired me to get some stats going again myself (using the same ping_exporter).  I used to even collect minutely traceroutes and single-stream TCP throughput ... I've gotten soft, I guess.
>
> The first thing I noticed looking at that graph was that the average latency has been declining over time, with only two discernible "steps". That tells me two things:
>
> Steps are generally the consequence of an event. For Starlink, this could be introduction of (different) AQM resulting in lower queue sojourn times. Or it could be different routing / scheduling that results in lower physical path latencies as a result of better paths being chosen.
> Gradual decline over time is likely to be the result of a longer-term change process. For Starlink, there are two longer term trends that come to mind: customer numbers and satellite capacity. I'd be inclined to suspect the latter is to "blame" for the gradual decline component here. If your Dishy sees more satellites now than a year ago, there's a higher probability that it'll get to talk to a satellite that's closer to both you and the respective gateway. You'd also expect stdev to decline in the case, which again is what we see here.
>
> Minimal latency will happen pretty much when the "Starlinks align" to give your ping empty queues with a satellite in near-optimal position to your gateway. Again not surprising that we don't see much of a drop here.
>
> --
>
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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