ARS Technica by Jon Brodkin - 11/12/2020
"Link stability is a little rough," but Netflix works great, one user says.
When SpaceX opened the Starlink public beta last month, the company told users to expect "brief periods of no connectivity at all" over the first few months. It's one of the reasons that SpaceX calls this testing period the "Better Than Nothing" beta.
Early reports from Starlink beta testers confirm that users are suffering from this problem to some extent. But Starlink's overall performance has wowed beta testers, many of whom previously had no access to modern broadband speeds.
"Link stability is a little rough," Reddit user Exodatum wrote on the Starlink subreddit yesterday. "We're getting jumps bad enough to disconnect us from connection-sensitive servers every 5-10 minutes, but things like Netflix are working perfectly. We watched Airplane! as an inaugural stream and it was fabulous." (Buffering deployed by Netflix and other streaming services can keep videos running when there are brief Internet problems.)
Exodatum placed the Starlink satellite dish/user terminal on a picnic table outside the house. Bad weather may be having an effect on the service. "There is heavy snow in our area, and dense overcast for the most part with a few breaks today," Exodatum wrote, adding that upload speeds have varied from 10Mbps to 30Mbps and download speeds from 15Mbps to 120Mbps.
More:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/spacex-starlink-has-some-hiccups-as-expected-but-users-are-impressed/
