[Starlink] Starlink in Cyclone Gabrielle in NZ

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

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After missing the opportunity to "soak test" our Starlink RV kit in the 
Auckland floods the other week, Cyclone Gabrielle (which is still 
noticeably upon us with very strong winds) was an opportunity I couldn't 
let pass. I've learned a lot over the last day or so, and it's been 
interesting to say the least.

So I put Dishy on our deck (slightly obscured view of the southern sky - 
the only bit of sky it will voluntarily look at for any length of time 
here in NZ) and tied it down on my painter's trestle with a few cable 
ties - so far it hasn't blown away.

I set up a ping series with 86400 large packets (1448 bytes to mimic 
you-know-what) to one of our uni machines to last for a day, starting 
just before the worst rain was forecast. I also put a beaker down next 
to it for some rainfall measurements - it collected 152 mm (~6") over 
the duration of the ping experiment. Not as bad as the deluge by a far 
shot but still, decent rain. Plus a lot of other areas got heaps more, 
and with Starlink, gateway and fellow users taking on water also impact 
on what you can do.

I also ran a few speedtest.net tests to a server at a local ISP at 
different times during the rain yesterday afternoon and last night.

Note I used the Starlink Ethernet adapter for this, not the WiFi from 
the router.

Here is what I got in terms of average and minimum RTTs and packet loss 
over a 60 s interval. Times approximate in local time:

   Note:

  * High minimum RTTs to start with (higher than for the speedtest.net
    tests, possibly because the packets are larger, possibly because
    Starlink games speedtest.net, possibly because of congestion thanks
    to everyone having been told to work from home that day and schools
    closing).
  * Noticeable jumps in RTT at around 9:30 pm and just before midnight,
    and then again at around 3:30 and 4:45 am and some time before 7 am.
    There were A LOT of power outages - not at our place (and we're
    USP'd with a 10 kWh solar battery anyway) but around ALL three
    Starlink gateways around the larger Auckland region (Clevedon, Te
    Hana and Puwera). I'm unsure whether it's a result of a large number
    of lifestyle block belters (the only serious Starlink customer group
    around here) losing power and thus freeing up capacity, or whether
    it's some change in the gateway arrangements.
  * Longest continuous ping fail: 22s
  * Packet loss appears elevated during the height of the rain. Rain fade?

Speedtest.net downloads didn't hit or exceed the 100 Mb/s mark until 
about 11 pm, and some runs yielded as little as 6.5 Mb/s down and 1.49 
Mb/s up. Average down was all over the place, average up typically in 
the mid single digits.

On the pro side, Starlink basically remained usable throughout, 
certainly for someone wanting to follow what was happening.

-- 
****************************************************************
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/
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