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A transport protocol’s view of Starlink

HairyLeg

ULTIMATE Member
Very interesting & deeply technical post* from APNIC's Chief Scientist about the TCP protocol and Starlink

TLDR,

Starlink provides a somewhat unique data link service. It has a very high jitter rate, a packet drop rate of around 1% to 2% that is unrelated to network congestion, and a latency profile that jumps regularly every 15 seconds. From the perspective of the TCP protocol, Starlink represents an unusually hostile link environment.


Heads up to EL reg for the pointer


*Possibly also appeal to the huge number of contributors on this site who post speedtest screenshots without any kind of serious analysis.
/s
 
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Nothing particularly surprising there given it has to hand off between satellites all the time.

I had it from pretty much the UK beta launch until earlier in the year when I started being able to pick up 5G from a 3 mast, and for most things it's not noticeable to the end user, it seems most user facing applications are pretty good at dealing with some network instablity thesedays.

If I forgot to switch to the VDSL beforehand before starting a game I'd sometimes see rubber banding caused by the latency variance/packet loss but pretty much everything else (including teams calls) worked fine the majority of the time.
 
Modern congestion controls are better at this now, things have been changed over the years for wifi, mobile networks and so forth. Dont think any OS use standard reno as default anymore. Selective ack's also also enabled by default.
 
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