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Comment by LukeLambert | Hacker News Reader

My parents in rural Northeast Texas use Starlink as their primary connection (they have a WISP as failover). Since Sept. 2022, I've been running automated speed tests four times a day (1 and 7, AM and PM). Speeds vary a lot throughout the day, but average about 100 Mbps down by 10 Mbps up.

https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...

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Before starlink my only option was 3MB DSL from Verizon, it was literally life changing as a WFH person to get the 100-200Mbps downloads that Starlink gave me (for $99/month).

Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.

Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.

It’s also possible that you would not have gotten fiber in the same timeframe if Starlink hadn’t competed for your business. Companies like Windstream are notorious for gaining regulated monopolies in rural areas, gobbling up government subsidies, only to deliver low bandwidth, saturated service to customers.

when we first moved here we had 15/5 that was actually 6/1 if we were lucky, so Starlink seemed like a good idea, so I got in my reservation early. We finally were able to switch to Starlink and while things were better, it became obvious that they were possibly oversubscribe in our area. Then they put caps in. Then they raised prices.

Then my rural power company saved the day by stringing fibre to EVERY single drop in their system. 1000 symmetric but really more like 950/800 but I'm doing fine, thanks.

I really think fiber is it for rural internet. They have the will to do it and it's rolling out all over in some states.

also: our telco is simultaneously running trunks underground, and we will probably hop on to that (since it's buried) for backup.

I'm in very rural NW New Mexico on Starlink for the last 18 mo or so. I run a q 15 minute Fast.com speed test via HomeAssistant. Speeds are almost always between 60 and 80 mbps.

Previously was on the only local competitor without data caps, 6 mbps via DSL. All others are either cell or satellite based and would destroy my wallet at my usually usage (<=1TB/mo).

Starlink has been a godsend.

Is it weird that most of the ones around 1am are under 50mbps? The variability I think make sense, but the 1am consistency seems strange.

I wonder if the satellites fly in a pattern that repeats every 24 hours...

Note that the timestamps are UTC, while Texas is UTC-6:00 during Standard Time and UTC-5:00 during Daylight Saving Time. The biggest dip is during prime streaming hours.

Huh. It's really nice to see actual metrics. I live in a rural area and get my internet through a fixed wireless provider. For a while I'd been wondering if it was worth giving Starlink a try

While this is usually a bit more bandwidth than I get, that isn't consistent and the ping is much worse. I pretty consistently get 50/15 with 15ms ping at about $90/mo after tax+fees. Based on some of the hype and press Starlink gets I assumed it would have had much better bandwidth, even if the latency is about inline with my expectations. Thanks for gathering and sharing this.

Is there any sort of data capping on their plan? Speed tests burn through quite a bit of data

I don't think Starlink has any data caps. On average, the tests download 140 MB and upload 15 MB each run (560 MB and 60 MB daily).

What are you using to run the automated speed tests?

Not sure what they use but I've used Speedtest CLI:

https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

works good.

Yep!

  speedtest -f json -I eth0

I also test the WISP connection on eth1

Thanks for the tip!

Great, thanks!

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