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Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection.

I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.

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Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds.

They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.

If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.

Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.

Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.

I'm thinking of using this for a backup connection if FIOS fails... we'd switch our office over to starlink... currently we switch to comcast and it's basicaly unsable... so wonder if starlink would be good for ssh connections etc...

When I connect to remote servers over SSH, I usually start a screen (another alternative is tmux) session and then perform my administrative and diagnostics actions in that session. This way, even if I get disconnected, I can reconnect and join that running session. There are other benefits to a screen multiplexer - such as multiple remote users being able to attach to the same session, a joy when a distributed team needs to diagnose an issue or watch some actions together.

Combine with mosh and you can even keep editing while the connection blips!

You may also want to look into mosh [1] as it will handle dropouts and continue where ssh would just fail on its own. Also has local echo for points of high latency.

Was a real life saver on some of the terrible sat connections of yesteryear.

1. https://mosh.org/

How does it compare to autossh?

autossh just re-reestablishes your ssh connection. It doesn't tolerate packet loss very well or have local echo like mosh.

mosh does require UDP ports, though, which might be problematic with some firewalls or proxies.

Mosh is great, but if you don't need the predictive terminal emulation, then you can try Eternal Terminal, which is easier to get running due to not needed an UDP port open.

yeah i use screen for everything too... still there are times when a connection dropping is a bit scary...

I’d fix the Comcast problem before switching over to something that is pretty much guaranteed to have drop offs at this point in time.

There are also devices that will give you a cellular LTE backup like the U-LTE from UniFi. I’ve heard the plans are a bit pricey.

https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-accessories/products/...

Yeah we have mifi’s as backup as well but usually only a few people can be on those. But also thinking about dedicated fiber… but honestly none of these seem as cool to me right now as bunch of satellites

I work from home on Starlink. My SSH sessions work just fine. When I first got the service, it was dropping quite a lot, but even then SSH worked pretty well. But these days, if there are any drops, I can't tell. The improvements in the last few months have been massive. I am even about to drop my land line, because WiFi calling on my cell phone has been nearly perfect. It works better than my cell phone does when I am in a good service area.

mosh instead of ssh helps for unreliable connections

If you live somewhere with FiOS, Starlink is going to be a non-starter. FiOS requires high density. High density kills Starlink connections.

I suppose Starlink can support a small, negligible, percentage of customers in an urban (or even suburban) area. (Same total number as a rural area.) So, if you think they are going to cutoff registrations as oppose to oversubscribe when they hit that point you may want to sign up right away.

I'm not sure if you are using FiOS as a synonym for FTTH. If so, you might be interested to know I live somewhere with FTTH that is reasonably low-density (~25-30 people per sq km). I think Starlink will be a very serious consideration here.

When I say FiOS, I'm thinking gigabit+ FTTH/FTTD (I'm not 100% sure of the difference). Given that you quoted people per sq km (about 70-84 people per sq. mile), you're probably not in the US. In the US, it's hard to get fiber outside of areas with the high density I'm quoting (at least in my experience).

But yes, that density seems fine for Starlink (although maybe it isn't in the end, who knows yet.)

My understanding is that StarLink is aiming for 100M un-guaranteed in beta. So that's considerably below gigabit.

But I also know that most households with FTTH around here use considerably less than 50M.

So perhaps you meant that gigabit internet kills Starlink. FTTH has some advantages over Starlink. But Starlink also has advantages over FTTH. If you need more than 100M, Starlink is not in the game yet. But if you want some leverage with the local monopoly and have typical usage...

Or, if you snowbird (common case here) and want the same provider on the border of Canada and the border of Mexico...

I wasn't referring to the speed (although obviously fiber has higher speed and reliability, and that will likely never change). I was referring to the fact that it seems like if you have the population density (in the US, at least in my knowledge) to justify a local ISP rolling out fiber to homes, you have a population density that will oversubscribe even the completed Starlink constellation (locally). Starlink just is never going to work in NYC or SF or areas with significantly less density there. Although it may work for a lucky few who manage to enroll before the area is full and locked down.

Some low-density parts of the US have fiber as well thanks to programs like https://www.usda.gov/reconnect

Sure, but it's some for a reason. It's a generality. So is "if you're shopping in Goodwill, you're not driving a Ferrari". Obviously, the recently broke, extremely thrifty, people looking for a collectable or to reclaim something accidentally donated are exceptions.

Maybe that program has covered more than enough people to make it worth talking about, but I didn't see anything like that.

The total aggregate bandwidth Starlink will have when their entire constellation of satellites is deployed and the number of satellites that will be visible at a given location at a given time place an upper limit on the number of customers they can have even with overselling bandwidth.

In the US their plans are to be able to support something like 5 million customers. That's less than 5% of the number of customers Comcast has.

It really is by design meant for people in areas that do not have terrestrial broadband.

This is exactly right!

I think that 5M is a high number (at least with the current number of satellites and their architecture), specially if they do not apply data caps.

I would say that 1M customers in the US is a more reasonable figure. If they hit these number, I expect the performance to degrade significantly.

I thought something like 20% of America did not have terrestrial broadband. At 5 million this is a giant change, but not as universal as I originally thought.

LTE makes a lot more sense if you have a decent signal. The cost is lower and speeds are comparable in many areas if you have good hardware.

For ssh you could use tmux or screen in case you get disconnected

I’m a multiplayer developer and I’m waiting to get a Starlink to test on (I have tested a few times on my moms). I want to makes games tolerate of the latency and instability of Starlink. Mobile networks deal with similar issues so I think it’s possible to make games with Starlink in mind.

I believe these kinds of latency and dropped packet issues be easily simulated on a normal PC without the need for a Starlink connection

exactly. Just use charles proxy (or mitmproxy) and ask it to drop packets/throttle the connection. No need to wait for starlink.

I do simulate these conditions, but there’s no replacement for real world condition testing.

Most tools for simulating latency and packet loss locally are a pretty poor model of the kinds of behavior encountered on real networks. In particular, latency due to bufferbloat rather than speed of light delays is extremely important to simulate, but not well-supported by many tools.

I’m not sure if it’s an endeavour worth taking honestly.. Starlink is still in beta, and once they can use starship to launch the satellites (hopefully somewhere next year) the launch capability will increase to 400 satellites compared to 60 on falcon 9. At that point they will be limited just by the satellites build throughput, so they will reach the 11k coverage very quickly.

I’m already getting a Starlink and I have one available to test on at my parents house so I think it’s worth it. I’m also evaluating it as a way for me to move closer to my family. I’m stuck in Portland because I require really good internet as I’m a 100% remote game dev working on multiplayer games. And the only option in Albany is really bad and expensive Comcast service.

I have five different Wi-Fi APs on my property. The handoff between them results in roughly 40-60ms dropout. That still interrupts audio calls. 1-2 seconds is huge.

Yeah, I am on lots of video and audio calls for work. 1-2 second drops while doing a client presentation are absolutely not ok.

> They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.

Enjoy the early adopter moment. Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net to cover more subscribers the second they must show a profit.

They are planning to increase the number of satellites by an order of magnitude. They’re launching extremely fast with Falcon 9, and prepping Starship for launch as well, which has 5-10 times the payload. May see Starlink launches on Starship join Falcon9 within a year or so.

So the opposite is true. They’re likely to massively increase the number of satellites.

If you want to argue the per user bandwidth might be different than for early users, that’s somewhat more plausible. But the number of satellites will increase. They can’t actually significantly change the inclination of the satellites once launched as it takes an insane amount of propellant, and even for solar electric thrusters, so your concern about them moving the satellites to other orbits is very unlikely.

No. They are increasing satellites by an order of magnitude, but users by about 20x. It's going to get worse

If they have 1600 satellites in orbit but are adding 40,000 more satellites (with more capability), then it’ll get better with 20x users, not worse. But anyway, the question was about satellite visibility, not bandwidth per user. The person I was replying to was claiming there will be fewer visible satellites as they’d be moving to different inclinations, which just isn’t feasible let alone likely.

> Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net

The only way to make a wider net whilst simultaneously adding satellites would be to raise the altitude of the satellites, which I am fairly certain is not possible for the existing satellites.

What about an SSH connection? Do you have to reconnect when it switches satellites?

No, the connection seems to be paired up through the ground station, so I wouldn't get disconnected via SSH. Mosh may be a better option if you want to make it feel rock solid though.

>but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds

I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.

Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:

https://satellitemap.space/

As a user of Starlink for more than 4 months - the quality has improved. While you say it is unusable for video calls, i think that is way overstated and it completely depends on where you are trying to connect.

Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.

If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.

To be honest, one-on-one Facetime calls and Zoom are almost perfect now, with few bits where it would pause and come back. Group calls were even less of a problem, because we're all used to one or two people having connection issues, and it's easy to work around that.

Yeah, different call quality requirements I think. I am mostly on client calls and I have a ready alternative to be on fiber. If I head out to my place in the country and have crappy call quality as a result, that does not go over so well.

That was the feeling a few months ago. But in the last 2 months, we have used zoom and other applications with very little drop outs. I have various TV stations running for hours at a time at high resolutions, and at the most there is a freeze frame for a split second once or twice every few hours. Frankly, I have had more issues with all the other internet connections we still maintain, than with Starlink. (Zoom was always dropping out with the others.) For example we have: (Slow) high speed DSL, (slow) high speed lte. In all those the internet download speeds are very variable, start fast (5-12) dropping to 0.5-1 and going up and down over time. Starlink maintains over 20 down, going up sometimes to over 30. We are in the countryside in Canada, so true high speed doesn't exist. For now, Starlink is the most dependable high speed option. (What will happen when more subscribers will join all on the one satellite?)

Zoom handles intermittent dropouts better than anything else I have seen and I don't quite understand the whole mechanism.

When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.

I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?

WebRTC adjusts playback speed to accommodate variable network latency. Here's a paper which describes it a bit.

https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/PQS_2016/abstracts/19.ht...

Yes! I had noticed this - cool to read more about it.

As Geerling points out, he has substantial obstructions. I have no obstructions, and see a few seconds of downtime per day. My wife and I regularly have multi-hour zoom calls with no problems.

Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.

Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.

It works with video calls, I’ve done it often.

Occasional blips occur, but the call isn’t dropped (and this is with some tree obstruction).

So it’s worth just getting it if that’s what you want it for. It’s probably 10x better than your existing connection.

My mom has been using Starlink in Albany, OR for 2 months. It started spotty, but now works better than her other Comcast connection. The only issue is that every day at 7ish they lose connection for about 5 minutes. She’s said it’s not been a huge issue and plans to cancel her Comcast at the end of her contract. She works remote and Starlink has been great for video calls and video streaming. She’s getting 30-40 down and 20-30 ms latency; Comcast is 20 down and 25 ms latency.

I use it for zoom daily. Yesterday was the first day in awhile where I had difficulty completing a call. The handoffs now last only about a second or two. Previously they’d be 15 or so seconds but that hasn’t happened for over a month. It is my daily driver though I do have back up DSL just in case.

> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.

If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.

And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.

https://starlink.sx/ can generate a coverage prediction chart for you

> "It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds."

He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.

This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.

And he also mentions that if this were his only Internet, he would trim the tree branches to get a better view of the sky. That's not what I'd do though; I'd put the satellite dish on a radio mast. Anyone who's ever done any kind of radio work knows that antenna height is everything, and in his specific case it's important for a different reason: avoiding line-of-sight obstructions.

Repending on height of the mast, it could be more expensive than the rest of your setup combined

trimming trees is a recurring activity, it might be expensive over time depending on type of trees and access etc

Maybe mounting the dish to tree would save your trees? https://asadotzler.com/2021/03/11/starlinks-view-of-the-sky/

https://asadotzler.com/2021/03/13/starlink-tree-mount/

I mounted a point-to-point link in a tree at either end.

1. Trees sway. It did matter for the PtP link in my case.

2. Installation and maintenance took time and it was dangerous.

3. Leaves and branches grow. Obstruction and misalignment over time were problems.

Advantages: it did work, and it was cheap and fun to do. I probably could not have installed a tall enough mast (too ugly to be accepted).

Yeah holy shit. The dude has obstructions and then writes a review about it? It's like putting bad gas in your car, then writing a review about how bad it was... Admittedly getting rid of the obstructions was a TON of work. It took me a few weeks of moving my dish around, and fiddling around with different mounts and options. I even topped a tree. But once I got rid of the obstructions, the service improved dramatically. Now with the launches that we have had of new satellites and other updates, I don't see hardly any drops at all. The most common annoyance with mine right now is the router/dish crashing. This happens maybe once every two weeks. Not much worse than the shitty Comcast-supplied modem. My next step is to use my own router and I think that'll take care of a lot of it.

Partial obstructions are not going to be rare for customers. While not a best-case review, this is arguably a more authentic review.

I get the crashes every week or so too and I use my own router. I think it's the firmware in the dish.

Had a team mate on Starlink and they would drop from our zoom call essentially every single time.

How long is that ago?

Maybe your meetings are just boring

Dunno, I did a ~20min FaceTime call that was essentially flawless. That call ended with me being very impressed by the stability and bandwidth of the connection. Far better than the satellite service at the location previously. Maybe it was just pure luck? Not sure, but the consistent 90-100mbit downstream and 2-digit ping is pretty impressive.

> It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming

Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.

That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.

Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.

I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.

When these dropouts occur, is the IP address stable?

Yes. We have the drops also. But they are happening less, and for only a blink. In the worst case, we experience a freeze frame. Most of the time can barely see the freeze.

If you’re getting drops every few minutes your view is obstructed. That’s about the time it takes an LEO sat to cross the sky so your dish probably can’t see a critical region in the orbit.

I think it's important to remember that "connections" in networking aren't actually connections. Everything is sent one packet at a time over networks that aren't presumed to be stable.

That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.

Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.

That's because he has huge sections of his sky blocked.

> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky

It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...

> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.

That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.

Obviously latency is important in synchronous use cases like video calls, however I wonder if a delay for slower one on one discussions would be all that jarring for users

For the remote areas this is intended for, it is already a 10x or more improvement. Great internet service is better than perfectly reliable slow internet.

It may be that anyone who is willing and able to do so has already thought of it, but on Linux you could multiplex the connection with LTE/3G/dialup and probably get pretty good results.

The outages have been getting better recently. They are supposed to go away entirely once the first constellation is fully complete. If you don't have obstructions, that is.

The dropouts are not universal. Results in the Starlink subreddit make it quite clear that you’re either obstructed or maybe have bad dish.

I would expect that won't stay a problem for long, they're still pouring those things up there.

I hope that the problem really is due to lack of infill because that means it'll be temporary.

> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky

Why is the antenna on the ground and not up on a tall mast?

It certainly can be on a mast; I put mine on a (short) steel tube mast, and it's been a great improvement on service that was already a vast improvement over Hughesnet-provided satellite.

Mine is mounted near the top of my roof's ridge. The problem is there are 8 trees (five of them more than 75') around my one-story house.

He mounted the dish on his roof. There are still some tall trees in the way of the dish.

Here's his YouTube video of the installation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynsCVOz7jv4

> That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing

This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.

If the connection drops for less than 5-10 seconds (this happens even on my Cable Internet sometimes), it's no problem. Most timeouts and TCP connections are okay with complete dropouts for 30 or 60 seconds (sometimes longer), as long as your local LAN doesn't drop your network connection.

Doesn't that depend on the nature of the "drop"? When it's just lack of signal then sure, but when I see connections break even momentarily (on cable...), there's often some sort of feedback (I think sometimes it's a connection reset?) that causes the browser to just error immediately, and then I have to reload the page... despite still being on the same network with the same IPs and such.

That is because of the way your connection is being dropped/what your router is doing. It’s sending reset messages back to your client telling it your connection is dead, instead of trying to resend your packets - which then succeed when the connection is back up.

That's a possibility in theory; I haven't root-caused this to know what's happening in every case (again: not every drop is the same). Regardless, I'm just talking about what the average end-user might see; I don't really care where the blame goes.

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