Star Link

I just love this $hip! Everyone using the business claims as fact and speculation taken to the extreme. Believe everything that comes from Elon or his crew? Not a chance! Is it possible that sometime in the near future (2 years or so) Starlink might provide "reasonable service at a reasonable price" to a substantially larger portion of the US than it can today? You bet ya! Covering the Planet with service without interruption as the business plan espouses is many years away.

1492 wrote:

sch911 wrote:


Latency is not an issue, period.

May not be for an internet user, but latency is a big concern for businesses. Amazon has said their research indicates they lose $160 million in sales annually for every 100 milliseconds (0.1 sec) of latency. The reason Amazon AWS is so focused on keeping it to a minimum.

That's not quite what the Amazon study said, they said that they could lose $1.6B for every second of additional web page load time. It's hard to find the primary source for this, I've only found articles that report on it, but none link to the original study. That can't really be extrapolated back to say that they'd lose $160M for 100msec of latency.

But this is irrelevant for the Starlink use case since Starlink is not meant to host business webpages. For the average internet user, latency (within reason) is not that relevant. For me, 50-60msec is fine for interactive use (i.e. connecting to remote servers over SSH or RDP). Online gamers are also latency sensitive and like latencies under 100msec.

But for the average user that's doing streaming or web browsing, even 100msec isn't that noticeable. Traditional satellite latency of 500msec or more is where things start getting noticeable and annoying. I used to maintain servers over a 64kbit Viasat connection and that was an exercise in patience, I could sometimes type entire command lines before I'd see it echoed back.

1492 wrote:

sch911 wrote:
Latency is not an issue, period.

May not be for an internet user, but latency is a big concern for businesses. Amazon has said their research indicates they lose $160 million in sales annually for every 100 milliseconds (0.1 sec) of latency. The reason Amazon AWS is so focused on keeping it to a minimum.

Compared to what? The Federal incentives are to cover the many rural people operating at dialup speeds or no access. This has to be a vast improvement.

sch911 wrote:


Latency is not an issue, period.

May not be for an internet user, but latency is a big concern for businesses. Amazon has said their research indicates they lose $160 million in sales annually for every 100 milliseconds (0.1 sec) of latency. The reason Amazon AWS is so focused on keeping it to a minimum.

DarkSkySeeker wrote:
I entered my name on the Starlink website way back last year. Then in early February, I received an email stating I could order a unit...

Good info. I also received my invite in late February to order Starlink, but holding off as I didn't think they had enough satellites to cover Washington, DC yet? Looks like we're at a similar latitude? May actually work in my area.

DarkSkySeeker wrote:
The incredible speeds shown on the Youtube videos occurs when you are standing right next to the Starlink router. In my home, the router is 30 feet away and the signal passes through the floor of my living room. In my case, this cuts the bandwidth down from 100 Mbps to about 40 Mbps.

Is there no ethernet connection to get through obstructions?

Only about 8% of the satellites have been launched. Also the satellites are getting improvements as they go. Current situation will improve.

One of our local school systems are using it to extend internet services to some of their students who live in very rural, mountainous areas of our county. According to our technology director, it's working well. These are residences that don't move, so...

DarkSkySeeker wrote:

I might be over-stating this here, but I think Starlink is wrong to suggest the latency of its system is so good. The obstructions, beta downtime, and no satellites of the beta are nearly unacceptable.

Elon says space should be exciting. Starlink is exciting. First there is anticipation about the order, and now I have anticipation about more satellite 'fixing' the downtime issues.

Latency is not an issue, period.

You must be an astronomer, or at least a wannabe one.

justme wrote:
From what I see on Youtube of that shows latency, it is much better than Huges Net and would be OK for VPN. That is the difference between low and high orbit satellites. I measure Hughes which was over 150ms and Starlink was below 50ms.

The latency becomes infinite during the downtimes I've mentioned. If the application you're using has a long timeout, you're fine.