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Starlink
I live in the depths of country so
have to put up with poor broadband. Even the weirder fibre companies
aren't interested, though they get subsidies. A neighbour had BT
fit fibre to her house, I think by her company, but that finishes about
300 m away.
BT's quote to fill the gap was £70k! That's why I call them Bloody
Terrible.
I presently use 4G mobile broadband
using three, the company with the silly name, with an external high
gain dish aerial. It's not bad. I get around 30 Mbit/s up and download,
frequently more. Data is unlimited and it costs £48 a month. However I
think I will need a better service in the near future as more high
definition services, such as television, are transferred to streaming.
I
already get occasional dropouts. I distribute the broadband around my
long and narrow house using a Cat5 wired network and two wifi access
points.
With 5G unlikely to be
available where I live for a while if ever, I decided to take a look at
Starlink. It costs more at £75 a month and the kit consumes much more
electricity. My present modem and dish uses about 8W but Starlink appears to
average about 40 W, maybe more. That's at least 1 kWh a day. I installed the Starlink app through
Play Store on my Samsung Android phone. The first option on the
menu is
'Check for obstructions'. It seemed pretty easy to use once I figured I
had to hold the phone close to where the aerial will be and then turn
it slowly through 360º with the phone camera pointing at the sky. I
was a bit baffled by what the screens told me, but then I came across
this excellent article by Colby Baber on optimal aerial siting and avoidance of 'obstructions' that will reduce performance. It is on his website at:
Colby has the ability to answer
your questions before you have asked them. I really do recommend
looking at the website.
Standard deviation of UK Starlink speeds
Starlink download data for the UK usually ranges
from 100 to 300 and isn't fixed for any one site. It does seem to vary
quite a bit, sometimes being
as low as 50. Mathematicians have developed a way of comparing sets of
varying data. For each set here are two numbers, mean and standard
deviation (SD), which is given the greek letter sigma
σ.
The mean is a sort of average. SD tells you how much a varying amount,
such as human body height, varies around the mean. This is shown in the
standard 'bell curve' below, the mean being the zero. Sigma is calculated from the set of data using a frightening formula. The whole thing is called 'normal distribution'.
One SD, shown here as dark
blue, includes 68% of the values of the thing you are measuring. Two
SDs (dark and lighter blue) include 95% and three include 99.7%. This
is called the 68 - 95 - 99.7 rule. Thinkbroadband calculated,
from its large data set, the UK's Starlink download SD as
perhaps 70. Two SDs (140) gives 95% of operating time at about 50 or
above, which matches quite well with an average of 200 and reported
occasional lows of 50, though 5% is not really occasional. As the
number of users grew over the last couple of years, the speed dropped but with an
increasing number of satellites it is said to have grown again to the
sort of numbers shown above.
The other important number for broadband is latency or 'ping'. This is
how it takes after you hit the key to send or receive data for the data
to arrive. Fixed position satellite broadband was around 800
milliseconds (ms), fibre is as low as 10 and 4G is somewhere in between
at about 40. Mostly it doesn't matter much if there a short delay but
it is critical for players in competitive online games. 20 ms is
generally thought to be good. In the UK thinkbroadband got varying
Starlink ping values with a mean of about 80, but Ookla got about 40.
As an aside, perhaps you play games on your phone? You will see adverts
for other games suggesting that if you can complete the game your IQ
(intelligence quotient) is 200 or even higher. The mean for IQ is
defined as 100 and the SD is 15. 200 therefore gives nearly seven
SDs! It is probable that even though there are 8 000 million of
us there will barely be a handful with IQ that high, even if it meant
anything at all. And if you were that clever would you waste your time
on phone games?
Conclusion
So what have I learned from Colby, Thinkbroadband and the Web in general? Above all, Starlink is
a work in progress. It has four major downsides and two warnings:
It is more expensive.
It uses more electricity.
Download speed varies a lot and sometimes will be little more than I get now.
Its upload speed is poor, and at 6 to 9 Mbit/s is lower than I
get now.
You have to be very careful with aerial placement as 'obstructions' damage performance.
Ping might cause difficulties for gamers (not me).
I will hang on for now and see what happens to average speeds and
prices. If I feel a growing need for more speed, and 5G is definitely
going to be unavailable, then I'll probably give Starlink a try.
(C)
Peter Scott 2025
Last edit 19 May 2025
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