SpaceX Starlink improves 30% median latency from 48.5ms to 33ms

SpaceX today announced that it has been working to achieve less than 20 milliseconds (ms) median latency for Starlink satellite internet and has already improved 30% of the median latency.

It’s revealed that the medium latency has increased by more than 30 percent from 48.5ms to 33ms during peak hours of usage across the U.S.

Latency refers to the amount of time measured in milliseconds. In action, latency represents the time it takes for a package to transfer from your Starlink router to the internet and for the response to be received.

The time spent in transferring the packet data and response is called round-trip time (RTT).

Latency contributes as a major factor for fast internet access. It may not reflect in downloads but for loading past web pages, audio and video calls as well as broadcasting.

To improve, the company is collecting “anonymized measurements” from its more than 2.5 million Starlink routers every 15 seconds. These latencies are then used to calculate the median and worst-case latency.

The term medium is used for 50th percent or p50 to a point where half of the latency measurements are below that number and the other half are above.

The worst-case latency on the other hand (99th percentile) is defined as the place where 99% of the measurements are better than the point.

It is mentioned that the worst-case peak hour latency has been reduced by more than 60% from over 150ms to less than 65ms in the U.S. Customers in other countries and regions can also experience 25% improved median latency and 35% worst-case latency.

Starlink Satellite Router Latency over Time (Image Credit: SpaceX)

New Developments:

SpaceX confirmed that the company has been measuring latency across the network on every subsystem down to the microsecond.

Among the new changes, SpaceX has deployed 193 different satellite software builds, 75 gateway software builds, 222 Starlink software builds and 57 WiFi software builds.

The company also promised to make more changes in the coming month in software builds to boost latency across the Starlink network.

(source – Starlink)