SpaceX Starlink Internet Experience & Performance

From 1 May through 22 June I ran Starlink benchmarks more than 400 times using various Internet speed tests. During this testing the system being used for facilitating the tests was connected to Starlink using the Ethernet adapter. No other systems were connected nor to the WiFi and the system was solely tasked with running these Internet speed benchmarks during times of no other activity on the connection. The benchmarks were scripted to run frequently and throughout the day for looking at speed fluctuations.

The Xeon E-2288G system running Ubuntu Linux was centered on using fast-cli for measuring the performance with Netflix's Fast.com speed test and then speedtest-cli for the Internet speed test service via Speedtest.net. Each speed test was run multiple times on each occasion for accuracy and when encountering deviation between 2% (frequently the case with the Starlink service) was testing up to 15 times per run... And with the 434 benchmark occasions over the past two months, it's quite a lot of samples for looking at how SpaceX's Starlink is performing currently in the Chicago (Illinois) / Indiana area.

First is a look at Fast.com's Internet download speed.

As you can see, there is a lot of variability to the Starlink download performance. Even among consecutive runs occurring one after another was a lot of variability as indicated by the error bars. The performance ranged from hitting around 192 Mbit/s downloads to sometimes hitting as low as ~30 Mbit/s. From loosely looking at the time stamps of all the data, Starlink was the slowest during the 9~12PM night time hours but generally the fastest in the very early hours of the day, presumably due to less congestion with other users. The fastest download speeds were all seen between 3 and 4 AM.

When it comes to the Fast.com upload speeds, it varied from 13.8 Mbit/s to at the worst performing around 5 Mbit/s.

Fast.com latency with Starlink was from 33 to 69 ms.