A First Look at Starlink Performance – Open Data

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In this webpage, you can find the dataset we used in the paper:

“A First Look at Starlink Performance” François Michel, Martino Trevisan, Danilo Giordano, Olivier Bonaventure. To Appear on the 2021 ACM Internet Measurement Conference.

Summary

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.

Minimum Latency is in the order of 20ms

Distribution of the RTT between a StarLink node and various anchors. Minimum RTT is about 20ms

The minimum latency of Starlink is in the order of 20 ms for close destinations, as publicly advertised. Under traffic load, it may increase to a few hundreds of milliseconds.

Throughput can exceed 100 Mbit/s

Throughput distribution, compared with traditional SatCom. Starlink can achieve more than 200 Mbit/s.

In download and upload, Starlink outperforms traditional SatCom, as measured with the Ookla speed test facility. The measured throughput with QUIC is lower compared to TCP speed tests for downloads but similar and more stable than TCP speed tests for uploads.

Web Browsing Experience

Page Load Time and SpeedIndex with StarLink are similar to those observed on wired networks.

For Web browsing, Starlink outperforms SatCom and has close performance to regular wired access. Looking at QoE-related metrics, Starlink is 75 − 80% faster than traditional SatCom.

Dataset

The dataset used for creating the above figures and all others included in the paper can be downloaded at: https://mplanestore.polito.it:5001/sharing/XjSAWzANb

It consists of various archives containing the data in JSON lines format. Each document contains several lines, each consisting of a JSON entry describing the experiment result (e.g., RTT in case of Ping), the timestamp and other metadata.