Is Starlink as good as advertised?

Starlink is the latest great iteration of the internet.

By providing high-quality global internet coverage from its network of satellites, Starlink is looking to bridge the global connectivity gap. As inter-connected as the world seems, the reality is that only around half of the world has easy access to the internet.

Starlink is already available in 40 countries, and if all goes to plan, fast satellite internet will be available in most of Europe, the Americas and Eurasia by the end of 2023.

Currently, this refers exclusively to broadband internet but will eventually also cover mobile internet in order to bridge the cap in areas without 3G or LTE.

The constellation of Starlink satellites already consists of over 3,100 active satellites providing internet service from Low-Earth Orbit, but how good is it in its current state?

In this short article, we aggregate global user reviews available on Youtube and complement them with PCMag's professional review and Ooklo's data-driven report to see what really is going on.

Youtube Reviews

Hundreds of Youtubers from all around the world have been live-testing Starlink, showing what the real user experience is on the ground.

Mexico City: AkimAguilar subscribed to Starlink's residential service in Mexico City in July 2022. He describes Starlink's connection to his house as being "significantly more reliable" than his own local broadband connection, even when enduring a hailstorm.

As a streamer living in an urban area, though, he concludes that the Starlink connection is too unreliable for live streaming from his home, as it keeps having short interruptions.

• Download Speeds: 100-200Mbps
• Upload Speeds: 5-25Mbps
• Ping: 60ms

Rural Michigan, US: DirtyTesla relied on an LTE hotspot for his home internet, and Starlink has drastically improved things for him for a price of $500 for the kit; and $99 a month for the service.

His Starlink service remained connected despite rain or snow. He concluded that Starlink's customer services are "a bit slow" but excellent once contact is established.

He experienced 2 outages over three months but just used his LTE as a backup when this happened. He does admit to having obstructions to his antenna dish as there is a "high tree line" around his property.

He describes Youtube and Netflix as running smoothly with Starlink but often experiencing a few second-long interruptions throughout.

• Download Speeds: 30-250Mbps (Typically 80-120 Mbps)
• Upload Speeds: 5-15Mbps

He doesn't think Starlink is there to "replace ultra-fast broadband" but to provide internet to areas that were currently disserved, like his own home.

Starlink quality depends on setup: JCristina believes that Starlink's performance depends on how well you set it up. He concludes the following:

• The Starlink dish works better unobstructed. The Starink app has a tool that will warn you about any detected obstructions.
• Having a long-enough cable to let you place the Starlink dish in an optimum location is essential, and having a high-quality pole extension if you need to set it up higher up.

• The quality of the connection also depends on the connection within your house. WiFi can be problematic in some buildings, so a mesh Wifi network or a cabled router kit can help have cable entries all over your home to plug in any devices.

North Wales (UK): Famau Media in rural North Wales doesn't have a fibre optic connection available to his home. He described his existing ADSL broadband connection as 1Mbps download and 0.5Mbps upload.

When he tested Starlink on his property, he had very little downtime and incredible speeds.

• Download: 150-200Mbps
• Upload: 20 Mbps
• Ping: 30-40

Remote France: PI-WAN who recently moved to a remote in France tested Starlink as early as a year ago (Summer 2021) and was getting 30-200Mbps download and 3-20Mbps upload speeds, with the biggest difference determined by whether he was tethered on using WiFi.

However, it was much more expensive for him than his existing LTE setup, which was not much slower and more reliable -he experienced a lot of intermittency in his connection. This was however one year ago.

PC Mag review

PC Mag does professional reviews conducted rigorously. This is the perfect complement to the observations described by the Youtubers above. The TL;DR is summarised below:

PC Mag describes Starlink as a "Set it and forget it" option, and this is certainly true; you just need to install it properly and use it -the satellite dish even has an in-built heater to melt any snow and ice.

But more interestingly, their speed review is undertaken under controlled conditions covering several days. The graph below shows the max, min and mean Starlink download speeds observed.

As the review points out, the speeds remain consistently above 80Mbps throughout the day. The speed and latency do fluctuate, but the biggest caveat pointed out by the reviewer (which coincides with the Youtubers) is that you may lose service for a couple of seconds every so often as the satellite dish momentarily loses connection while adjusting its orientation to face the optimal signal.

Ookla Review

We saw it as essential to include some conclusions from the Ookla Starlink reports, as these are principally data-driven. Ookla have been covering Starlink's speed and reliability by surveying speeds over multiple jurisdictions and across service providers.

Until Q1 2022, it was all rave reviews for Starlink, but their Q2 2022 report revealed something concerning: "Starlink speeds decreased in every country we surveyed" over the quarter as a result of more users signing up for their service.

The median download speeds decreased between 9% - 54% in a number of countries, and upload speeds decreasing across all continents surveyed.

The issue is that Starlink isn't launching satellites fast enough to meet subscriber demand, which has been accelerating quarter-to-quarter and is expected to explode as they begin operating in many more jurisdictions over 2023.

In terms of Starlink download speeds, the top 5 countries in Q2 2022 were:

1. Brazil (128.83 Mbps)
2. Portugal (123.01 Mbps)
3. Netherlands (122.43 Mbps)
4. Austria (112.01 Mbps)
5. France (110.98 Mbps)

At first glance, this suggests that Portuguese-speaking countries have the fastest Starlink internet, but this has no technical basis and could be just a coincidence.

In general, Starlink is faster in Europe than anywhere else, but internet speeds seem to remain within the performance ranges advertised on their website:

Conclusion

It is clear that Youtube and PC Mag's reviews are fairly consistent with each other and with the performances advertised on Starlink's website.

The main takeaways from the reviews are:

• Starlink is easy to install and operate, but a sub-optimal setup will affect performance.
• Starlink has enough speed and latency to do most things reliably.
• Starlink has inherent sporadic downtime (seconds in length) related to Starlink's change in dish orientation.

The Ooklo report provides a better idea of what may be happening in the future as satellite deployment struggles to meet subscriptions, which are expected to increase dramatically in 2023.

With Starlink's competitors developing fast, as well as the competition expanding into the mobile phone internet market, it is difficult to predict what will happen next.

But for now, if you live in a remote location, in the sea, or love travelling by RV, Starlink may just be your internet lifeline.

However, it's not currently a viable replacement for fixed-line fibre home broadband and business broadband connections in terms of price, reliability and speed.