Thursday, February 18, 2021

Generalish availability of Starlink

Starlink has opened up service to the unwashed masses on a first-come, first-served basis.

Service is still $99/month plus $500ish (+ taxes + shipping) for the dish.

Likewise, Starlink is still designating the service as beta, so you get what you get and you might not get it at all, since there's a limited number of spots. Service levels are clearly not high enough for commercial service as outages are explicitly to be expected and the ToS limits service to residential use in named locations with strict no-reselling, no sharing terms.

On the upside, so far there are no bandwidth caps, IPv6 has made an appearance and both latency and bandwidth has been reasonable according to multiple reports, with cautious optimism that latency might be trending downward going forward.

The billion dollar question is of course will available bandwidth per user also be trending downward going forward.

It'll be interesting to see how Starlink handles the onslaught of thousands, if not millions, of customers that they need in order to break even. It'll also be interesting to see when/if Starlink breaks out of beta and starts offering commercial service.

Starlink would undoubtedly make an excellent addition to the connectivity toolkit of any network engineer looking to diversify their options in connecting businesses and enterprises. Not to mention the use of Starlink as backhaul.

Network engineers being network engineers, the first RIPE Atlas probe is already up using a Starlink terminal:

https://atlas.ripe.net/probes/1001821/

As posted on NANOG, here are some tidbits:

"This probe is at present not contained within AS14593 (Starlink). All beta test terminals that I am aware of right now, including my own, are in cgnat IP space and meet the public Internet via AS36492 (Google).

This particular terminal is topologically closest to things at major IX points in the metro Seattle area. The absolute lowest ping time I've seen to something at the Westin is 15.85ms, with averages more often between 21-32ms."



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