With the advent of the new Starlink ‘Standby’ plan at $8.50 AUD a month, I decided to lower my costs (as I’m retired) and see how/if it was usable.
I thought I’d report my findings after 15 days of use.
Firstly, Starlink tells me I have managed to DOWNLOAD: 45GB since August 8 (15 days) !
The ‘Standby Plan’ offered unlimited data at 500Kbit/s, so what does a speed test reveal ?
Download: 0.53Mbps -this is unusual a speed actually faster than advertised! Usually it’s the other way around!
Upload: 0.55Mbps, even faster up!
Ping Time Casino, Nsw to Sydney: 47ms
How about Youtube ? It’s a mixed bag, very slow to start playing and always the lowest resolution, but oddly bearable after a few minutes as the resolution improves a bit. Once its playing, it’s usually smooth with no drop outs.
Downloading ? Slow at 0.53Mbps. 4 GB will take 24 hours
Youtube video is fine to watch once I have DL it, same with Sabnzbd, it’s working as usual, no problems, just way slower to dl anything, but I get it sooner or later. I just have to wait a bit and be patient.
Video and voip, apart from the slow starts, it’s excellent, no drop outs, audio or video.
Installing NixOS apps ? Same as usual, most small apps seem ‘instant’. Big apps can take a long time.
Summary: it’s absolutely worth $8.50. Will I go back to ‘high speed’ ?
I love this. I find as much joy in computing with constraints as I do with playing high-performance gear. One can do a lot with that sort of link!
In the past, I’d have suggested (and implemented) a transparent proxy cache on that sort of a link, but since the almost universal adoption of HTTPS I wonder whether the browsing experience would be improved by making the browser cache on your PC huge (so any revisit to any site ever would almost certainly result in a cache hit) and seeing if there’s any browser plugins or functionality to do prefetching across the board. The latter will have various links and resources being downloaded while you were reading the current page, so by the time you click the next link, the resource may already be in the cache.
The other thing that jumps off the top of my head is that if Starlink satellites are half-duplex (not the Ethernet port, but the actual antenna/satellite part) then perhaps playing with QoS might help. If you can prioritise small packets into a high priority class then that might help the TCP ACKs back to base a bit quicker. Really trying to conjure up memories from the days of managing 64kbit ISDN links here… possibly worth looking into window sizes or MSS/MTU as well. The objective is to get as much data down before an ACK needs to be sent back, and when that ACK needs to be sent, get it back up to the satellite quick smart so the next set of data can come down. I’m sure a lot of that magic is done by Starlink, but if it’s not fully optimised for that 500kbps symmetric speed then it may be possible to squeeze a tiny bit extra out of it.
On a more mundane level if you have regular YouTube channels that you watch you might get value out of @matthew919’s TubeArchivist. I have it installed but not played with it much. I believe @matthew919 uses it with Plex but I see there is now a jellyfin plugin which I will look into.
Like social media apps, YT can suck your time. The algo gets hold of you and pretty soon you’re once again following Hannibal over the alps in the Second Punic war. TA should prevent that. It only gives you what you ask for.
Fast is good, but homelabbers will try to squeeze the maximum out of what they’ve got as @Belfry has shown. In any event one only needs 1200/75 baud as the @techman once told me.
Yeah, same. I don’t think we squeezed enough out of our hardware’s potential in the 90s before the mouse came along and bloated the software side of things.
