Starlink

[K5lwq]

Fiber optic just became an option in my area a few months ago. Spectrum offered free installation to my house and 1 gig up and down for $70.00 per month. Also offered a 30 day money back guarantee if I didn’t like it.

It is noticeably faster than Starlink but latency is much better with Starlink than Spectrum. This surprised me. I would have thought fiber optic would have less latency. I don’t do gaming but Starlink would be better for those that do.

I did cancel Starlink although I almost reinstated my account due to Spectrum going down a few times in the first 30 days. Down times were longer than anything I experienced with Starlink but really was not a problem. It has been solid for the last few weeks and we have had some storms that Starlink would have lost signal for a bit.

Starlink is a great option and I will be keeping my equipment so I have the option to go back.

 

[ponytug]

Fiber optic just became an option in my area a few months ago. Spectrum offered free installation to my house and 1 gig up and down for $70.00 per month. Also offered a 30 day money back guarantee if I didn’t like it.

It is noticeably faster than Starlink but latency is much better with Starlink than Spectrum. This surprised me. I would have thought fiber optic would have less latency. I don’t do gaming but Starlink would be better for those that do.

I did cancel Starlink although I almost reinstated my account due to Spectrum going down a few times in the first 30 days. Down times were longer than anything I experienced with Starlink but really was not a problem. It has been solid for the last few weeks and we have had some storms that Starlink would have lost signal for a bit.

Starlink is a great option and I will be keeping my equipment so I have the option to go back.

Congratulations on getting fiber!

Fiber should have much lower latency. Much. To be fair, I try to measure ping times to some site that is physically close, or to the end of the ISP's network. It can take some poking around to get that. Or have both tests to something consistent like 8.8.8.8 or cloudflare (1.1.1.1).

In my experience, there is a big range on uptime between different ISPs as they can be better or worse about having sufficient backup power to ride through outages.

If it were me, I'd keep the Starlink hardware as well.

All the best,

Peter

 

[buckeyefarmer]

fiber is coming to me, and a bit cheaper than starlink. I'll probably switch.

 

[NoTrespassing]

Congratulations on getting fiber!

Fiber should have much lower latency. Much. To be fair, I try to measure ping times to some site that is physically close, or to the end of the ISP's network. It can take some poking around to get that. Or have both tests to something consistent like 8.8.8.8 or cloudflare (1.1.1.1).

In my experience, there is a big range on uptime between different ISPs as they can be better or worse about having sufficient backup power to ride through outages.

If it were me, I'd keep the Starlink hardware as well.

All the best,

Peter

I usually have a ping under 30ms and under 20ms quite often with Starlink and that's running wireless to the xbox. What should someone expect with fiber?

 

[WM75Guy]

I usually have a ping under 30ms and under 20ms quite often with Starlink and that's running wireless to the xbox. What should someone expect with fiber?

I get the same with Spectrum 400 Mbps fiber, which is fiber all the way to the modem. I am using a D-Link Eagle Pro mesh router. The router is hardwired to the modem with about 40' of Cat 5e. My computer is about 40' from the router.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

My current speed test is 81Mbps down , 17 Mbps up, 23 ms time.
Fiber is offering $40 for 300 Mbps as their slowest package.

 

[ponytug]

I think that it is important to compare apples to apples with ping / latency numbers. I used to use okla's speed test, I was getting 7-9ms on our old DSL system that converted to fiber about four miles away, but I spent many moons working with our ISP provider to get the kinks out of their side of the system, some of which resulted lower ping times. (Squeaky wheel)

However, for all of that testing, I was using a wired Ethernet on my side of the modem. If you want the best comparison testing for Starlink or fiber, I would suggest doing the same by trying to plug a wired laptop in to the respective modems to run a speed test to a local server. Then rerun the test via the rest of your hardware (router / WiFi / mesh) to get a sense of where the latency might be for the system as used.

@WM75Guy the Ethernet won't add any delay to speak of, but the router will add some and so will WiFi.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Fallon]

Starlink

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Use Speedtest on all your devices with our free desktop and mobile apps.

www.speedtest.net

Maverix fiber

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Use Speedtest on all your devices with our free desktop and mobile apps.

www.speedtest.net

From my phone in the same exact spot a minute apart. From my wired desktop 8 could get about 4-6,000 megabit down & several thousand up. Mostly a limit of speed test software, but also my router. The extra speed rarely has much value though other than downloading large files.

Anything below 50ms is considered low or very low. 100ms would be ok ish. Much of latency will be about where you are testing to. Trying to test from Denver to Singapore will be 200+ ms. So adding 5 vs 20ms on top of that is insignificant.

Not sure if Starlink is routing traffic in space yet or it just goes back to the ground after the first hop. I think those satellites had to wait for Starship though. At any rate the speed of light in a vacuum 300,000 kilometers per second but only 200,000 km/s in glass (fiber optic cable). So in theory routing over lasers between satellites could be faster.

 

[BigBlue1]

My current speed test is 81Mbps down , 17 Mbps up, 23 ms time.
Fiber is offering $40 for 300 Mbps as their slowest package.

That will be great. Fiber is almost always a better option than Starlink. Just be aware that there are a LOT of people who report that their ISP's 'rated' speed is never realized. This isn't specific to fiber... just a fact that those 'rated' speeds are almost always theoretical maximums. My son lives in a house with roommates in a metro area with supposedly 1Gb fiber internet and they almost always get less than 300 Mb actual speeds (using consistent speed test methods).