[ad_1]
SpaceX says it’s made progress to drive down Starlink’s latency by over 30% for US subscribers, citing improvements implemented over the past month. On Friday, the company published a report that sheds light on SpaceX’s ongoing effort to one day bring the latency rates down to under 20 milliseconds. “In the United States alone, we reduced median latency by more than 30%, from 48.5ms to 33ms during hours of peak usage,” the company wrote. “Worst-case peak hour latency (p99) has dropped by over 60%, from over 150ms to less than 65ms.”The latency has also improved for users outside the US, with the median latency down by up to 25% and the worst-case latency reduced by up to 35%.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The report aligns with PCMag’s own findings, which show Starlink’s latency averaging at 38 milliseconds in January, down from 60 milliseconds in September 2022. In contrast, the latency rates for wired-based ISPs in the US average at 13ms, according to Ookla. Driving down the latency is important to help online games and video calls run smoothly on the Starlink network. The company has been monitoring the latency rates by collecting “anonymized measurements from millions of Starlink routers every 15 seconds,” the report says. SpaceX adds that internet data over Starlink needs about 10 milliseconds to make a “round-trip” from the user’s Wi-Fi router to the orbiting satellite and then to ground stations. However, the Starlink network can suffer from additional latency from software-based limitations such as “unneeded processing delays, unoptimized buffers, or unnecessary packet drops that force retries.”
(Credit: SpaceX)
In response, the company has been working to iron out inefficiencies with new algorithms. This includes the addition of “active queue management,” which can prevent a large user download on a Starlink installation from affecting the latency on another user’s computer while they game.
Recommended by Our Editors
“Over the past several months, monitoring and metrics have also been added across the network to measure latency on every subsystem down to the microsecond,” the company added. “We have rigorously tuned our algorithms to prefer paths with lower latency, no matter how small the difference and to remove any and all sources of unnecessary and non-physical latency.”The results are causing many US Starlink users to experience latency rates between 30ms to 42ms, according to the company’s official map. To bring the rates down further, SpaceX said: “You can expect latency to continue to improve over the coming weeks and months as we prioritize software changes, build additional ground infrastructure, and launch more satellites.” Another tactic also involves orbiting the Starlink satellites closer to Earth. The company’s report added that Starlink now has over 2.6 million subscribers, up from over 2.2 million back in December.
(Starlink.com)
Get Our Best Stories!
Sign up for What’s New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
[ad_2]
