SpaceX Starlink is Coming to All Cars and is Close to Cable Internet Latency
A SpaceX Starlink paper on Latency shows a picture of the Starlink system with an SUV with a flat Starlink dish build into the car.
by Brian Wang
A car or truck highspeed Starlink service would be a capability that other providers would not be able to compete other than the mobile 5G internet services which have large coverage gaps during road trips.
Starlink engineering teams have been focused on improving the performance of our network with the goal of delivering a service with stable 20 millisecond (ms) median latency and minimal packet loss.
Over the past month, SpaceX have meaningfully reduced median and worst-case latency for users around the world. In the United States alone, we reduced median latency by more than 30%, from 48.5ms to 33ms during hours of peak usage. Worst-case peak hour latency (p99) has dropped by over 60%, from over 150ms to less than 65ms. Outside of the United States, we have also reduced median latency by up to 25% and worst-case latencies by up to 35%.
In the first two months of 2024, Starlink teams have deployed and tested 193 different satellite software builds, 75 gateway software builds, 222 Starlink software builds, and 57 WiFi software builds.
In 2023, Google Fiber as the only Broadband Upload Speed with a score of over 100 Mbps 106.9Mbps across the whole U.S. AT&T FTTH and Verizon FTTH are in second and third place respectively.
What Needs to Be Improved for Great Starlink Latency?
Latency in the Starlink network is driven by several factors. The biggest ones are:
• Physical speed-of-light propagation from the user to the satellite and back to the ground. This is in the range of 1.8-3.6ms per leg, and usually under 10ms for the round-trip. Additional latency can be induced if traffic flows over laser links, instead of directly to the ground (as a result of congestion mitigation, lack of satellite to ground paths, or other factors). While laser connectivity is essential for connecting the most remote locations on Earth and for routing around congestion in the network, we are making strides to ensure that latency sensitive traffic can flow over the shortest path possible.
• Ground latency from the gateway sites to the internet connection point driven by ground network layout. In 2024, we are adding 6 internet connect locations (called Points of Presence, or PoPs) in the US and are optimizing gateway locations and our planning algorithms to ensure that traffic can land as close to its destination point as possible. We will continue to ensure that users are allocated to optimal internet connection locations, so that all users get the lowest
latency possible route to the internet.
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I don’t think many can appreciate just what a difference Starlink has made to regional areas in Australia etc. Only 3 years ago, our choice of location and home was dictated by availability of Australias shambolic NBN, which even if available at all, is typically very patchy, slow, and NBN as a company are plain dishonest. In the last two years of having Starlink I think I’ve had maybe two relatively short outages in the instance of extremely heavy storms, and the whole family can enjoy faultless 4k streaming, music, and my work is not interrupted. Great to see the progress continues.