Starlink

[sodamo]

I call my mobley my internet in a box. I took it on a trip this weekend. I have power strip, modem with the mobley sim, and router all in a box.

I think Netgear makes something similar.

 

[BigBlue1]

Starlink tech support sent this;

Hey Peter,​

Thank you for your patience! These outages are being caused by what we call handoffs. When a satellite and your dish need to switch, the time in between is called a handoff. These handoffs can happen roughly every 90 seconds and will not impact most user applications. Short outages less than 1 second long are generally too short to be noticeable in most cases, and shouldn't interrupt service. We try to be as transparent as possible which is why that information is included in the outage report. The app shares that these are most noticeable in online video games or video calls.​

​

This is something that can vary as we make changes to our constellation, which is why you may not have experienced these before, and currently do. It is not uncommon to see these, and have them go away after some time has passed. We do not have any sort of time frame on when the handoff related outages will go away. We are always striving to make improvements to our overall network, whether it's more satellite launches, or making updates for our ground infrastructure!​

Do you have any additional questions that we could help with at this time?​

All I can comment is that it is a new behavior, it does impact service, and it is noticeable, which is why I looked into it. From the middle paragraph, it sounds like they know they have equipment issues on their end.

​

All the best,

Peter

I have those same sub-second 'outages' listed for my system. I'm on VPN all day, every workday. Probably half of my time on Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings with audio & video. Two kids who do a fair amount of connected video games. I have no noticeable disruptions to any of these services. Things have been rock solid since the beta program ended in summer 2021.

Not saying these things aren't affecting your service, but just suggesting that you consider that they might not be the root cause.

I'm just impressed that Starlink makes stats like these visible to customers. I can't think of any other ISP that would provide a outage tracker that revealed the guts of their systems.

 

[ponytug]

I have those same sub-second 'outages' listed for my system. I'm on VPN all day, every workday. Probably half of my time on Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings with audio & video. Two kids who do a fair amount of connected video games. I have no noticeable disruptions to any of these services. Things have been rock solid since the beta program ended in summer 2021.

Not saying these things aren't affecting your service, but just suggesting that you consider that they might not be the root cause.

I'm just impressed that Starlink makes stats like these visible to customers. I can't think of any other ISP that would provide an outage tracker that revealed the guts of their systems.

Thanks! That is helpful on both counts.

I think it is a reasonable thought, and one that I am still poking around to explore. Our network is extremely lightly loaded most of the time with background uploads of a few kilobytes of data each minute. Downloads go up with streams and videos of course, but even without those uses, we see noticeable (5-10 second) delays opening simple web pages on relatively fast devices. The delays aren't reproducibly slow, and are not limited to certain sites. Checking my bandwidth logs on my router doesn't show anything, and shows something like 2-13% utilization of the link capacity.

I'm still exploring, but I am running out of rocks to look under here.

All the best,

Peter

 

[BigBlue1]

I guess there is always the possibility that the congestion or disruption is outside of the scope of the connection from your Starlink to the Starlink network (i.e. the satellite) but within the portion of Starlink from the sat to the ground station and its path to the Internet backbone. Perhaps your local area has high usage (in your cell or the ground station that serves your geography) and the bottlenecks are there. Probably not something you can really learn more about or affect, unfortunately.

 

[ponytug]

I guess there is always the possibility that the congestion or disruption is outside of the scope of the connection from your Starlink to the Starlink network (i.e. the satellite) but within the portion of Starlink from the sat to the ground station and its path to the Internet backbone. Perhaps your local area has high usage (in your cell or the ground station that serves your geography) and the bottlenecks are there. Probably not something you can really learn more about or affect, unfortunately.

I suspect that a) yes, we are in a high demand area (just due to the length of time it took to get a dish here, and we are adjacent to suburbia not well served by traditional providers), and b) I think that the behavior seems to be part of their dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme, and the latest version penalizes us because our usage is low and then when we request data, it takes their scheme a few seconds to allocate additional bandwidth our way. I know if I run several speed tests back to back that the first one is always lousy, and the subsequent ones are 2-5 times better. That suggests to me a certain inertia in bandwidth allocation... YMMV!

Packet loss to know sites is running 1-2% which is new behavior. It used to be near zero.

All the best,

Peter

 

[WoodChuckDad]

We had a recent Starlink software upgrade. I didn’t bother to check stats after the upgrade because I didn’t see any performance issues. About two weeks ago we experienced several periods of outage that lasted several minutes each, in the middle of the day. I didnt check speeds, when it came back just statistics for outage. I checked speed this morning when I first logged on to work and was shocked that it came back at 179 mbps. Usually a good result for us has been 70 or above. Some times dipping down to mid to low 20’s.
I checked again in an hour and it was over 200. Advanced test was over 200. But by 930 it dropped to just over 100. Still quite an improvement.

And this last one just now, at 1:30 on a friday came in at 195

 

[Torvy]

Finally got up on the ladder to mount the dishy on top of the shop (16' at shoulder).

Ran the cable under my lean-to, then inside shop and across the trusses where I have the Starlink router and Ethernet adapter in my loft. From there I have Cat 6A cable (shielded and outdoor rated) down the north end of my shop (near the house) and across the 15' (will bury, soon) to the house ethernet box I installed. That line runs to a switch with 7 rooms wired (installed during build). Then I ran one of those lines into a DLink dual band wifi router I had on hand. So far so good. Everything works OK. The bottleneck seems to be my old wifi router. (Getting 50-75 Mbps Up and 12-20 down) The TVs and Desktop will be wired all of the time. I have Jacks in places I commonly use my laptop, so I will be wired at least half of the time. Wifi bandwidth should not be a problem.

Any suggestions for an upgrade router that will not break the bank?

 

[newbury]

Finally got up on the ladder to mount the dishy on top of the shop (16' at shoulder).

Did you put something inline to catch lightning?

 

[ponytug]

FWIW: Outdoor rated cable is not the same as burial rated.

As @newbury points out, getting a gas tube and MOV surge protector on your Ethernet as soon as it comes out of Starlink is prudent, plus, of course, having starlink on its own surge protector as well.

Lots of modern routers should be able to handle 100-200Mbit connections. I would put some effort into moving slow, older devices to a different 2.4GHz WiFi network, and reserving a separate one for faster devices.

I'm a personal fan of a main / guest / IoT / printer network setup to get the easily hacked devices off into networks that can't access your main network. Way too many places have been hacked by printers and IoT gizmos.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Torvy]

Says it is burial rated.

Our whole electric system has a surge protector/conditioner on it. I know that does not cover the ethernet. I'll have to take a look at that. Right now, my lightning diversion is having a lot of trees that are taller than our buildings. Haha