A First Look at Starlink Performance

Michel, François [UCL] Martino Trevisan [Polito] Danilo Giordano [Polito] Bonaventure, Olivier [UCL]

With new Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations such as Starlink, satellite-based Internet access is becoming an alternative to traditional fixed and wireless technologies with comparable throughputs and latencies. In this paper, we investigate the user-perceived performance of Starlink. Our measurements show that latency remains low and does not vary significantly under idle or lightly loaded links. Compared to another commercial Internet access using a geostationary satellite, Starlink achieves higher TCP throughput and provides faster web browsing. To avoid interference from performance enhancing proxies commonly used in satellite networks, we also use QUIC to assess performance under load and packet loss. Our results indicate that delay and packet loss increase slightly under load for both upload and download.