Breaking Through the Clouds: Performance Insights into Starlink’s Latency and Packet Loss
Our modern era is experiencing a rapid evolution in satellite Internet access. However, it is unclear how well these systems perform and what we can expect from Internet access via satellites. Previous research has studied the performance and resilience of such systems, uncovering several drawbacks (e.g., high packet loss and unstable performance). In this work, we thoroughly investigate the characteristics of the Starlink network. We scrutinize the TLS handshake latency, packet loss, and the diurnal latency variation to establish a correlation between these factors. To achieve this, we utilize historical data measured by RIPE Atlas and Cloudflare Radar from 2022-01-01 to 2024-06-30. We find no statistically significant correlation between latency and packet loss in the Starlink satellite network. However, we discover an intriguing pattern suggesting that Starlink exhibits specific latencies more consistently than others. This finding contradicts recent research that claims a significantly better performance of Starlink with median latencies substantially lower than 80 ms. Furthermore, our findings reveal significant geographical variations, where even highly developed countries such as Germany experience packet loss ratios exceeding 10%. Additionally, we examined Starlink's routing behavior, which reveals two sudden spikes in latency. The first spike is attributable to the transition between satellite and terrestrial networks, while the second is seemingly unrelated to Starlink.