Interesting trend here; starting around the first of the year the latency of my Starlink connection has gone down, as measured by IRTT pings to a server I run at BlueVPS in LA very close to my Starlink’s terrestrial egress.
I think this effect is real. Comparing the week starting 2023-12-11 to the week starting 2024-01-08, the mean went from 47ms to 39ms. That’s 8ms or almost 20%! I think worst case performance is better too, I can’t quite quantify it but the 99% is a lot less spikey and the maximums are lower. (See graphs at bottom) Looking at data for a year this is a major new change; it was steady at about 47ms for a whole year.
Update: a tweet from the SpaceX CEO: “Significant improvements have been made to @Starlink latency (ping) & many more to come. Target is <20ms.” Guess that confirms what I observed.
I don’t see any corresponding change in packet loss. Averaged about 0.56% packet loss in both weeks.
I don’t have a good way to guess why this might have improved. There’s basically no measureable latency between the first hop I can see after Starlink and my monitoring host at LABlue; I’ve always assumed they’re in the same datacenter. My memory is it was never more than 2-3ms at most.
There’s a similar effect visible in Starlink’s own reported latency number (from the gRPC debug data). That should rule out any question of my IRTT monitoring, Starlink’s own numbers show the same pattern.
A simple explanation is improvements to Starlink itself. Either they’ve lowered the latency of their infrastructure or they have more capacity and so my packets are getting buffered less. Possibly the improved 95% performance suggests less buffering but I wouldn’t bet heavily on that guess.
Interesting that it’s a downward trend over a week, not a drop in one day. That suggests it’s maybe a gradual change in capacity rather than a step function change in routing setup.
Here’s detailed graphs of before and after.
And a graph of a whole year:
(For completeness, I should note I changed my IRTT monitoring setup around December 10 when I migrated the server from a physical machine to a virtual machine inside Proxmox. But this change clearly post-dates it. Also if anything the virtualization should cause more latency or packet loss although I’ve seen no evidence of that.
Nelson's log 