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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

Main advantage of Starlink over existing satellite is a (much) lower latency. Starlink constellation is flying by with a new satellite overhead every 10 minutes or less, and they're operating just above the atmosphere. Musk has claimed 20ms latency, which if true, would be absolutely a smash victory for rural Internet users everywhere.

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It would be pretty nifty if the latency and jitter is consistent enough to be used for basic SIP/VoIP. Under 100ms in general would be hard to notice latency much different than a mobile phone. Starlink could go as far as rolling their own VoIP service with guaranteed QoS. I would also hope during beta testing they are developing intelligent queuing to deprioritize bulk transfers, and optimize bursty traffic where latency would be most apparent.

The article says the beta testers are seeing 30-90ms.

> The article says the beta testers are seeing 30-90ms.

That's actually pretty impressive.

Why is that impressive if the original press announcement said it would be < 20ms?

Satellite usually gets several hundred to nearly 1000 ms of latency, so being under 100 is a big deal.

Satellite latency is so bad most people with smart TVs can't stream to them because most streaming buffers empty faster than the network responds with more packets. They are usually stuck with their computers to pre-download content or increase buffer size/decrease video resolution.

I didn't say the latency was as high as GEO. If a car commercial said a car was $20k, and you got to the dealership and it was $60k, would you just throw your hands up and say it's still pretty good? The point is that the publicity was based on completely fake promises.

When you live in mountainous areas you usually have three options.

Dial-up - if its offered still in your area,

Point to point internet - if you have neighbours in line of sight also participating.

or Satellite - if you are in line of sight to the satellite

Many people I know up-country usually all they get is satellite, so yeah starlink may not the promised 20ms, but its hella lot better than what traditional satellite is providing (also hopeful starlink provides better reliability and tech support which in satellite is quite atrocious as well)

Heh - as far as what's promised vs delivery, read the fine print on satellite internet plans, they have wording saying the hope is to provide the advertised speeds but there is no guarantee that they ever will.

Everything you just said applies to starlink as well. Why the double standard? Still need line of sight, they still won't provide advertised speed guarantees ( no ISP does).

And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.

> And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.

Nobody who has ever used existing satellite says this. Latency becomes a huge issue at 500ms.

For real time games, yes, for the vast majority of traffic, no. Streaming and web browsing are plenty interactive enough for this to matter. Even VoIP does perfectly fine if it's tuned properly.

Browsing on 500ms is terrible and 500ms delay on voice ruins conversations. Most streaming apps don’t even have deep enough buffers to deal with the terrible latencies of satellite.

A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load.

I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.

You keep mentioning this, and I can't come up with any announcement that it would be under 20ms, just quotes from Elon saying the target was under 20ms. Is there a press release you're aware of with that quote?

> Musk stated that Starlink's 20ms latency is designed to run "real-time, competitive video games." He also stated that Version 2, at a lower altitude, "could be as lows 8ms latency."

https://www.shacknews.com/article/118663/spacex-starlink-20m...

Version 2 is not at a lower altitude. In fact, most of the latency incurred is not from altitude at all. They are moving several hundred kilometers from their highest to lowest orbit, and if you do that math that's not accounting for much of the 20ms.

> Why is that impressive if the original press announcement said it would be < 20ms?

It's impressive that they are not too far off, while the service is still in beta. And compared to regular connections you can get on Earth, it's a very decent ping.

As a side note, press announcements are made to generate buzz and create headlines, so you should always expect hyperbole instead of strict facts. If you look at video games announcements, press releases constantly state that every new game is the best ever in their genre.

I think the latency will go up after launch. They don't have much of the complexity in the system they'll soon need.

There's an update to the article with more speedtests, including one hitting 20ms

That's better than the latency on my fiber connection

Location matters, so FWIW it seems to be from northern US / southern Canada to LA.

That would have been absolutely awesome. If memory serves me right, my latency was around 150ms on average, which was ok-ish but not great.

On satellite right now. I'm getting ~600ms latency :(

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