SpaceX will have to demonstrate Starlink internet's low latency within the next month to qualify for

It’s designed for less urban areas in the first place imho.

 

Last October Starlink was tested by the US Air Force at 610 Mbps to a flying aircraft.

 

I've seen ~20 ms pings mentioned, but I don't know how official it was. I haven't seen an upload figure mentioned from that test. Given the limited number of Starlink sats in orbit and available ground stations at that time, latency may not have been a significant test result.

 

The Starlink system is only partly in place with about 2% of the total satellite count currently in orbit so far. Many of the needed ground stations are still under construction and the next generation of interlinked satellites are still in the design and testing stage. The current Beta testing should probably be more correctly labeled as "Alpha Plus" testing.

 

If you're thinking it was ever going to compete with speed with DOCSIS or fiber you were sadly misinformed. Those speeds would look very good to someone who is stuck with GSO satellite internet, or is on the extreme edge of DSL or cellular deployment and gets single digit Mbps currently. That's what it has to beat to be successful. It was never going to compete in urban/suburban areas for multiple reasons.

 

I was just going to say, but Krel beat me to it. 60Mbps on the best case absolutely sucks. Maybe not for rural folks who get internet via telegraph . Starlink on more then one occasion said they would be competitive with Docsis/Fiber. 1Gbps speeds and low latency .

"According to SpaceX, Starlink will offer speeds of up to a gigabit per second at latencies from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds."

 

Those speeds are actually pretty good for this initial phase and for the target market. Think rural folks who only currently have access to DSL as an example. And those speeds are only going to improve as the project progresses.

 

While the speeds may improve, it seems likely that latency will increase with the number of users. I reason that systems such as this that need to switch between satellites as they enter and exit line of sight likely have a pretty significant overhead.

As we know, there's always the hopeful person that has a relatively tiny hole where they can see the sky. If you can't get a GPS fix, Starlink probably won't work for you.

 

It would be a lot better than DSL. It would solve the problem rural folks have. Gotta wonder if that will be another nail in the coffin for sat services. And cable.

Rich

 

Except in many cases that is not how it plays out. Folks would get StarLink for faster internet. At that point the economics is StarLink + sat or StarLink + an OTT service. So the cost of StarLink comes out of the equation when comparing sat to OTT service in that scenario.

 

I think the key point there is just as it is now. Do we count the cost of our Internet service as part of our OTT service cost if like most, we would have the same Internet service even without the OTT service?