SpaceX's satellite internet service "Starlink", how fast it is

When it comes to internet speed testing services, Ookla's Speedtest is a staple. Ookla looked at data from Starlink, satellite internet competitors HughesNet and Viasat, and got some interesting numbers.

While it may not be entirely surprising, Ookla's research revealed that Starlink's line quality far outperforms HughesNet and Viasat. According to Ookla, "Starlink will be the only satellite internet service provider available in the US with latency approaching fixed broadband levels as of Q2 2021, with a median download speed of 97.23 Mbps, compared to modern HughesNet ranked second with 19.73 Mbps, followed by Vianet with 18.13 Mbps."

It wasn't competitive at all on the latency side. Latency is the time between a user's action on the Internet and receiving a response. Starlink's median latency was 45 milliseconds (ms), close to fixed broadband's 14ms. Low latency plays an important role in applications such as voice and video calls, gaming, and live content streaming. By comparison, Viasat had a latency of 630ms and HughesNet had a latency of 724ms, which is almost unusable for applications that require low latency as mentioned above.

The reason for such a large difference is simply physics. Unless quantum networks are realized, we will not be able to communicate faster than the speed of light. Starlink uses a constellation of low-orbit satellites for its communications, with satellites flying at altitudes of 550km to 1200km above the ground relatively close to the surface, while HughesNet and Viasat satellites are much farther away. Since it uses a geosynchronous orbit 35,000 km above the ground, it takes time to exchange signals.

Of course, Starlink isn't as fast as cable or fiber optic Internet. Ookla says the median performance of available fixed broadband connections in the US is 115.22 Mbps bandwidth and 15 ms latency. However, Starlink's real competition isn't Internet services that use landlines in cities and suburbs. The company aims to provide alternative options for people living in rural areas. I know people still using dial-up modems and very slow DSL connections. These lines can even reach kilobits per second (Kbps) levels of bandwidth.

For such users, Starlink is clearly the better option. However, Starlink's service is still being rolled out. This means that at any given time in any given location, it will perform much better than other services. According to Ookla's research, users in Morgan County, Alabama had the best performance, with bandwidth of 168.30 Mbps. Users in Madison County, Indiana, on the other hand, got more than 100Mbps lower performance.