When I was in Iceland recently, another thing I wanted to have a look at was if Starlink would work reliably there as well. So why wouldn’t it? Have a look at the Starlink satellite map image below and you see where my question came from: Most Starlink satellites are in orbits with an inclination that doesn’t bring them over arctic and antarctic areas of the planet. However, there are some that have a different orbit that brings them close to the poles for coverage of such areas.
If there are enough, then this will work, as you definitely don’t need a lot of capacity at these higher latitudes. But are there enough satellites for a continuous coverage?
After trying out Starlink in Iceland for a few days I can definitely answer my own question with ‘yes’. If enough of the sky is visible, and I have the feeling it had to be a bit more than half of the sky required in central Europe, I had uninterrupted Starlink reception whenever I tried. The screenshot on the left shows that after power up at around 9:08/9:09, there were no outages reported for an hour.
And as far as uplink and downlink speeds were concerned, they were pretty much the same as in Europe, around 100 Mbps in the downlink and 20-30 Mbps in the uplink direction with my mini Dishy in most cases. But at times, I also got much more than that, see the speed test image below.
Another interesting fact: Here’s the IP address I got assigned and location info attached to it:
145.224.67.227 – Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, GB
In other words, there is probably no gateway in Iceland but all data is forwarded to the UK. That makes me wonder if inter-satellite links (ISLs) were used for this or not. No easy way of telling from the ground, however.
Very nice!