News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by Roritharr on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @06:33PM (#23838883)
The one thing I find iffy is that the current generation of Starlink Sats aren't supposed to do Sattelite to Satfelite communication, so the actual latency benefits around the globe aren't going to materialize the first couple of years. I'm really interested when they plan to have their service to be actually competitive latency-wise.
Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by walrus01 on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @07:07PM (#23839204)
The latency will be about 20ms higher than a terrestrial pure fiber based internet customer in the same location as the earth stations. For example whatever the latency is from the north bend WA site to downtown Seattle (a few milliseconds) plus 20ms. This is a considerable improvement over the absolute bare minimum rtt ping time on a Geostationary based VSAT which is 492ms.

There are a lot of terrestrial wireline last mile access technologies that already introduce 15-25ms latency on the last mile segment. Such as ADSL2+ on old POTS copper wiring or a heavily loaded docsis3 cable network. That is just from the home modem to the neighborhood's closest network node.

Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by jcims on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @08:19PM (#23839768)
Yep just tested this morning, 33ms to my next hop on the network. ~15M/800k ADSL2 in Ohio.

I think folks in regions of Ohio will provide an interesting test bed as we’re in fringe coverage of 4-5 of the total set of planned ground stations.

(Speaking of ground station, would be interesting if we could talk to starlink over AWS’s ground relay service.)

Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by hedora on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @09:58PM (#23840368)
fast.com reports 10ms unloaded, 200ms loaded latency for me with comcast.

If starlink hires some people that understand buffer bloat, the physics are already good enough for them to do better than our local oligarchs.

Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by Roritharr on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @07:23PM (#23839330)
Absolutely, huge improvement, i'm just looking forward to the times when actual intercontinental latencies are LOWER than typical terrestrial connections.
Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by kziemio on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @08:08PM (#23839696)
Most DOCSIS 3 cable internet connections I've tested are under 10 ms round trip to the gateway. With consumer fiber, it's usually under 5 ms. These are far better than anything SpaceX will do.

PC gamers will want wired internet. Everyone else could probably do with deal with 80 ms without even noticing, so SpaceX will be very successful as long as it's affordable and reliable.

Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by stx on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @06:37PM (#23838926)
For some remote places that may not matter as much. For example in the rural Rocky Mountains you are limited on internet options. This could still be much needed competition.
Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by dzhiurgis on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @06:50PM (#23839059)
> latency benefits around the globe aren't going to materialize the first couple of years.

Even with ground stations they actually will, there's analysis on youtube about that.

If each router can also be a peer (or even a ground station), then it's going really quick to achieve that.

Re:Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved by samoa42 on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @07:08AM (#23843603)