[Starlink] Re: Multiday connectivity issues in Kenya.

[Ben Eastvold <ben@gladtech.org>]

Confirming this from Nakuru County, Kenya, with data. I run a residential
technology training program on Starlink (sole connectivity, ~20 students),
and we have had this exact issue for 5+ days, surviving a dish firmware
update (~July 8) and full power cycles of dish and router.

Symptoms: specific destination prefixes are blackholed or unstable while
everything else performs excellently (100+ Mbps down, ~23ms latency).
Affected destinations include Fastly and Akamai ranges, including
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://starlink.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E
itself. The affected set shifts over time -- sites work for a period, then
fail.

TCP connect tests (curl, port 443), same terminal, same minute, against
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://bbc.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E's
four published Fastly addresses:

151.101.0.81 -- TIMEOUT, no TCP handshake (8s)
151.101.64.81 -- TIMEOUT, no TCP handshake (8s)
151.101.128.81 -- connected 0.28s, HTTP 301
151.101.192.81 -- connected 0.30s, HTTP 301

Minutes later, all four of
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://starlink.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E's
addresses (151.101.1.143, 151.101.65.143, 151.101.129.143, 151.101.193.143)
timed out with no handshake -- including addresses in the same ranges that
had just worked for
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://bbc.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E.
The reachable prefix set is moving under our feet, which reads as route
instability rather than a static misroute.

Akamai similarly affected:
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://ichef.bbci.co.uk&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E
(23.56.162.175) fails TCP entirely, so BBC pages currently render text
without images.

Traceroutes: local hops (terminal -> 100.64.0.1 -> SpaceX 206.224.x) are
consistently healthy at 20-30ms. Traffic then enters Liquid Telecom and
takes inconsistent paths to the same destination set -- some traces via
Johannesburg (lza-p2-tdn, lza-p3-jhb hops), one via Marseille
(lfr-p1/p2-mrs), with latency spiking 80-265ms and heavy loss beyond hop 7.
A trace toward the Akamai destination exits via a different upstream (
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://twelve99.net/Arelion&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E)
and dies similarly, so this spans multiple transit paths out of the Kenya
gateway, not a single peer.

Full timestamped traceroute and curl output available if useful, and I can
run tests on demand from this terminal. Ticket filed with Starlink support
(maintained via workaround, since their portal is unreachable from the
affected connection).

Ben Eastvold
GLAD Technology, Nakuru County, Kenya