It’s the variation in latency. Lower jitter repress a more consistent connection. High jitter means the connection has stability or contention issues. 1 ms jitter is impressive on satellite.

The reduction of ping times will be dependent on whether there is any slack in the system - in the end the speed of light is a limiting factor as the radio waves have to get to/from a satellite that is in orbit. The only way to reduce that is to bring the satellite closer which is probably not going to be an option. Starlink is already much better latency than geostationary satellites because it is in low earth orbit.

They're not running the full complement of either constellation numbers (less than 10%) and crucially ground stations numbers. Then also the vaunted laser interconnects, which are not yet running.

As you point out these are non-geo birds, therefore the earth to bird distance is not the major factor, but rather network switching characteristics and hand-offs that are related to factors noted above.

I believe they are aiming for sub 20ms ping, but I have read predictions of ping times as low as 10ms (which is optimistic). But the proof will be in the pudding I suppose.

Ah, ok, I hadn't done the actual calculation. On doing so it appears that a round trip from ground to satellite to ground should take about 3ms (the satellites according to google are 340 miles up).

So the rest of the latency is down to ground station locations and other switching. Hadn't realised how little the latency would be impacted by the round trip. A quick comparison with geostationary shows how much difference there is as the round trip there is over 200ms.

Yes I think there is still a lot of possible optimisation up their sleeve....the flip side of course is that customer numbers will increase over time, so that twill be interesting to see how well it copes when there are several million subscribers.

I have taken a gamble with Starlink - they let you select a different shipping address to service address so I placed an order for an address currently serviced (which I don’t live at) to be delivered to my home address which is out of service area.

It’s around 12 miles straight line between the service address and my home.

This is a bit of an experiment. Starlink is meant to ONLY work at the service address however there are threads on Reddit where people have done this same thing and have some kind of service which is faster than standard or other broadband tech available.

Starlink do have a 30 day full refund as well so I figure I’ll try it and see if it works.

Apparently for others that have done this Starlink have offered a full refund or to suspend the service until that area is served. To be honest this might be the best option to keep hold of the dish until it is in a service area.

Quite honestly I’m fed up of the lack of clarity from openreach on my area for FTTP and for Cityfibre and Lightening fibre getting to my part of town this year. So I am willing to take a gamble on this.

It says 2-3 weeks for delivery so I will have to wait a little while.

Edited by Spinstorm (Fri 19-Mar-21 11:10:51)

My kit arrived within 48 hours of our getting the DHL despatch/tracking number. Pretty good service from the west coast. Actually a day ahead of their forecast!
I had it set up on a pole, to clear trees and neighbour's roof, before nightfall and all seems to be exactly as advertised. Easily does 100 Mb down and 30 Mb up...sometimes reaching almost twice those numbers. In the past 24 hours it has been down for 2 minutes for lack of satellites and 19 minutes for "beta downtime" - presumably this is network reconfigurations etc..
Very impressed!

Edited by deleted (Fri 19-Mar-21 16:23:39)

Mine arrived Monday. Still in the box. It’s a backup connection for rural Suffolk property (4G is now too slow). Need to sort a permanent chimney mount and route cabling. The roof is a bit treacherous at the moment...

Have you taken a power draw figure yet? They sound thirsty

I’m trying to find out how big the semi geo-fence cells are - any clues?