A browser-side view of starlink connectivity

Mohamed M. Kassem, Aravindh Raman, Diego Perino, Nishanth Sastry

Abstract: LEO satellite "mega-constellations" such as SpaceX's Starlink, Amazon's Kuiper, OneWeb are launching thousands of satellites annually, promising high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity. To quantify the achievable performance of such providers, we carry out a measurement study of the spatial and temporal characteristics as well as the geographic variability of the connectivity provided by Starlink, the current leader in this space. We do this by building and deploying a browser extension that provides data about web performance seen by 28 users from 10 cities across the world. We complement this with performance tests run from three measurement nodes hosted by volunteer enthusiasts in the UK, EU and USA. Our findings suggest that although Starlink offers some of the best web performance figures among the ISPs observed, there are important sources of variability in performance such as weather conditions. The bent-pipe connection to a satellite and back to earth also forms a significant component of the observed latency. We also observe frequent and significant packet losses of up to 50% of packets, which appear to be correlated with handovers between satellites. This has an effect on achievable throughput even when using modern congestion control protocols such as BBR or CUBIC.