A First Look at Starlink Performance - Network Performance Measurements

Sep 15, 2026

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Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations such as Starlink provide an alternative pathway for Internet access compared with fixed and wireless technologies, with similar throughput and improved responsiveness. This paper evaluates user-perceived Starlink performance through measurement-based benchmarks across idle, lightly loaded, and loaded conditions. Results show consistently low latency, with TCP throughput improving versus geostationary satellite Internet and web browsing becoming faster. To study effects of load and packet loss without PEP interference, QUIC is also used for comparison.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Background and Motivation

Benchmarking Approach

Results and Comparison

Implications for QUIC and TCP

A First Look at Starlink Performance François Michel∗ UCLouvain [francois.michel@uclouvain.be](francois.michel@uclouvain.be) Martino Trevisan University of Trieste martino.trevisan@dia.units.it Danilo Giordano Politecnico di Torino danilo.giordano@polito.it Olivier Bonaventure UCLouvain [olivier.bonaventure@uclouvain.be](olivier.bonaventure@uclouvain.be) ABSTRACT With new Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations such as Starlink, satellite-based Internet access is becoming an alternative to traditional fixed and wireless technologies with comparable throughputsand latencies. In this paper, we investigate the user-perceived performance of Starlink. Our measurements show that latency remains low and does not vary significantly under idle or lightly loaded links. Compared to another commercial Internet access using a geostationary satellite, Starlink achieves higher TCP throughput and provides faster web browsing. To avoid interference from performance enhancing proxies commonly used in satellite networks, we also use QUIC to assess performance under load and packet loss. Our results indicate that delay and packet loss increase slightly under load for both upload and download. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network measurement; Wireless access networks. KEYWORDS Starlink, Satellite Communications, Low Earth Orbit, Network Performance, Measurements ACM Reference Format: François Michel, Martino Trevisan, Danilo Giordano, and Olivier Bonaventure. 2022. A First Look at Starlink Performance. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’22), October 25–27, 2022, Nice, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745](https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745) . 3561416 1 INTRODUCTION Internet access technologies and Internet protocols are constantly evolving. Broadband technologies such as xDSL and cable modems are prevalent today, but they are being replaced by optical fibers. In densely populated areas, such as cities, fiber deployment can be profitable, while in rural or mountainous areas, however, it can be much more expensive. For this reason, network operators have been working on other Internet access technologies since considerable time. Some propose Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) technologies [15, 17] . Others are deploying hybrid networks that ∗ François Michel is FNRS Research Fellow ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains anonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only. IMC’22, October 25–27, 2022, Nice, France © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9259-4/22/10. . . $15.00 [https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561416](https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561416) combine cellular and xDSL [22, 28] . Given the opportunities offered by these rural areas, several companies nowadays offer satellitebased Internet access solutions. Classical Satellite Communications (SatCom) use geostationary satellites with at an orbit of 22236 miles. A single satellite can cover a large portion of the Earth at the price of a latency of several hundreds of milliseconds due to their high elevation [18, 30] . Such communication technology may provide connectivity to thousands customers with connections easily reaching a speed up to 100MB, with the drawback of a minimum latency of about 600ms [37] . A new approach is to use a constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to dramatically reduce communications latency. The first large-scale deployment of this kind is the Starlink constellation, currently operating more than two thousand satellites. The commercial service started in beta version in October 2020 in the United States and from 2021 in European countries. It promises Internet access with latency on the order of 20 ms and bandwidth s

FAQs

What performance aspects of Starlink are measured in the paper?

The paper measures user-perceived performance using throughput for both QUIC and TCP, along with latency and packet loss under different loading conditions.

How does Starlink latency behave when the link is idle or lightly loaded?

Latency remains low and does not vary significantly under idle or lightly loaded links.

Why does the paper use QUIC in addition to TCP?

QUIC helps assess performance under load and packet loss without interference from performance enhancing proxies, since QUIC traffic is encrypted and authenticated.

Sep 15, 2026

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