On 14/01/2023 6:02 am, Jonathan Bennett wrote: > > It'd be interesting to hear from Jonathan what the availability of > home > broadband is like in the Dallas area. I note that it's at a lower > latitude (33N) than Auckland, but the difference isn't huge. I notice > two teleports each about 160 km away, which is also not too bad. I > also > note Starlink availability in the area is restricted at the moment - > oversubscribed? But if Jonathan gets good data rates, then that means > that competition for bird capacity can't be too bad - for whatever > reason. > > I'm in Southwest Oklahoma, but Dallas is the nearby Starlink gateway. > In cities, like Dallas, and Lawton where I live, there are good > broadband options. But there are also many people that live outside > cities, and the options are much worse. The low density userbase in > rural Oklahoma and Texas is probably ideal conditions for Starlink. Ah. So what actually happens here is that you're relatively close to the Springer teleport (~120 km), and the IP address that Starlink assigns to you gets geolocated to Dallas. Given lack of current Starlink availability in the region that isn't correlating with population density like in other parts of the US, we're probably talking lots of satellite capacity for very few users here. Plus the extra fibre latency down to Dallas is peanuts. Which explains your data. You're at 34-something north, which is not that different from Auckland. > Clear view of the sky is king for Starlink reliability. I've got my > dishy mounted on the back fence, looking up over an empty field, so > it's pretty much best-case scenario here. So-so. Your dishy probably orients itself north-facing, but you'll still be talking via your closest teleport or teleports, so Springer or Dumas. If Starlink can talk to satellites that are straight overhead, it will - I've attached a photo of my current setup at home, dishy south-facing onto my roof. I've pinged for almost a day now in this configuration and have < 1% loss. Practically all loss events are one-offs, i.e., outages are under 2 s. Before that, I had the dishy on the ground in the same position, and had around 2% ping loss. So being able to see more of the sky makes a bit of a difference obviously, but it's not huge. Internet was "usable" in both configurations. -- **************************************************************** Dr. Ulrich Speidel School of Computer Science Room 303S.594 (City Campus) The University of Auckland u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/ ****************************************************************