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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

How is the real world latency? In the past latency has made satellite almost unusable, but those were geosynchronous sats, not ones in very low orbits like Starlink. (They're claiming 20ms, but I get 9ms on my fibre and I've seen reports that the real latency is somewhere around 50ms.)

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speedtest.net consistently shows pings in the 38-45 ms range for me with starlink, with 150 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up. I've been able to video chat and game without any issues. My previous satellite connection was nearly the same price as starlink, for only 100GB, pings of 600-800ms and only 1-5 Mbps up/down. For those of us poorly served Starlink is an absolute quantum leap.

I've personally seen as low as 30ms, but also up to 60ms. I also have a bit of packet loss, but my dish is just sitting on the ground in my wooded back yard right now. Once the weather turns back towards just being cold, I'm going to move the dish to my roof and see if that helps the packet loss. Maybe being able to see more of the sky will help get a more consistent latency too, but I'd guess more satellites are really going to be the fix there.

Fast enough for me to participate in Zoom chats and no one knows my bits are flying through space.

Could you measure it for us?

Will report back.

Username reminds me of an old saying in charities etc - if you want something doing, give it to someone who has too much to do already. Very appropriate..!

30ms-50ms average, some spikes up to 100ms but rare enough that it hasn't caused me any issues.

If real world latency is 50ms, that would put it in the same ballpark as cable internet, wouldn't it?

All of the real world numbers I've seen from users have been lower than cell latency.

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