And further I went into ‘terra incognita’ with Starlink, this time to a place which was quite challenging in terms of terrain. But again, looking at the bright side of it, it was the first time I had to experiment for a while to find a good spot to place ‘Dishy’.
In the previous post, I had a look at the 5 GHz Wi-Fi of the Starlink router at close range for maximum throughput. In this post, I’ll have a look at the completely opposite scenario: How Starlink’s Wi-Fi performs when used to bridge a larger distance. This wasn’t actually a theoretical test, but the scenario … Continue reading Starlink – Part 13 – Local Wi-Fi on 2.4 GHz
Out of the box, a Starlink terminal comes with the satellite dish, affectionately called ‘Dishy’, and a Wi-Fi Router. As an Ethernet port is not part of the package and has to be ordered separately, Wi-Fi is the only default connectivity option. So how does that Wi-Fi Access Point perform?
How much of the sky can be obstructed for Starlink to still work without connectivity breaks (in Germany)? This has been one of the most important questions I had about Starlink before I could try it out on my own. Here’s an image that shows an obstruction diagram, which the Starlink app on a smartphone … Continue reading Starlink – Part 11 – Obstruction Diagram
Part 8 of this series took a closer look at the downlink performance of two Windows 11 based machines over Starlink. This episode now takes a closer look at the uplink. Before I go on, let’s set expectations: As was shown in part 5 and 6, there is a significant difference in uplink performance on … Continue reading Starlink – Part 10 – Windows over Starlink – Uplink Performance
In part 8 of my Starlink series, I’ve been looking at downlink throughput with a Windows notebook. The maximum speed I could achieve with iperf3 was around 30 Mbps, while tools like speedtest.net and LibreSpeed could easily reach 150 to 200 Mbps. So what’s the difference and which speed test reflects real world use?
In my previous posts on Starlink, I’ve used Linux as the operating system on my notebook and on the network side server for my iPerf3 throughput measurements. Due to packet loss on the link, there is a significant difference between using different TCP congestion avoidance algorithms. When the standard Cubic algorithm is configured on both … Continue reading Starlink – Part 8 – Windows over Starlink – Downlink Performance
After seeing the many transmission errors over the Starlink air interface that TCP can handle quite well, particularly on Linux with the BBR congestion avoidance algorithm, I was of course wondering if this has an audible impact on real time voice services when used over Starlink. So here’s how that went:
So here we go: After the interesting but somewhat slow Starlink uplink throughput results discussed in part 5, let’s have a look if the TCP BBR congestion avoidance algorithm can improve the situation. BBR is not configured out of the box, but I use it on all of my servers and workstations. BBR could be … Continue reading Starlink – Part 6 – Uplink Performance with BBR
In part 3 and 4 of this Starlink discovery series, I’ve been taking a look and the downlink throughput performance. While the standard Cubic TCP congestion avoidance algorithm used by Linux produced only meager results, switching to BBR produced a five-fold throughput increase. So how about throughput in the uplink direction?