Stefan Mileschin

Playing with forest connections

A beta tester of SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service tested his gear in a national forest which gets no cell service from any carrier.

He wrote in Reddit: " Works beautifully. I did a realtime video call and some tests. My power supply is max 300w, and the drain for the whole system while active was around 116w... It didn't work well with a heavy tree canopy / trees directly in the line of sight, as expected. I would be connected only for about 5 seconds at a time. Make sure you have as clear a view of the sky as possible!"

The Starlink beta costs $99 a month plus $499 upfront for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. A new speed-test data collected by Ookla and published by PCMag last week found average Starlink download speeds of 79.5Mbps and average upload speeds of 13.8Mbps in October, when the service was in a more limited beta.

The same data found average download speeds of 24.75Mbps for Viasat's Exede service and 19.84Mbps for HughesNet, both of which offer service from geostationary satellites. Upload speeds for Viasat and HughesNet were 3.25Mbps and 2.64Mbps, respectively. Starlink's low-Earth orbit satellites greatly outperformed the higher-orbit satellites on latency, with Starlink posting a 42ms average. Viasat and HughesNet came in at 643ms and 728ms, respectively, according to PCMag.
https://fudzilla.com/news/network/51...with-the-speed