This commentary is by Tom Evslin of Stowe, an entrepreneur, author and former Douglas administration official. It is republished from the Fractals of Change blog
The blue dot circled is our dish in the center of Vermont. Volunteers run software which collects statistics every 15 minutes and uploads them to update the tables and the map at https://starlinkstatus.space.
You can see below that we have been averaging download speeds of 143Mbps, upload around 12Mbps, and ping times of 43ms. Below that you can see our most recent updates including the percentage of time our dish was obstructed (0% happily).
There are also tables with country and region-wide averages. Of course, there’s also a smart phone app to see all this. None of this is affiliated with Starlink or SpaceX (although I hope they pay attention to it); it was developed by frequent software contributors Tysonpower and Mike Puchai.
There are at least three uses for Starlink Statuspage:
- For those who are broadband-deprived, helps evaluate Starlink as a solution.
- For those with Starlink, shows whether they are getting the performance they should expect.
- For planners, shows the geographic spread of broadband access provided by Starlink.
Starlink Statuspage won’t reach its full potential until there are many more users willing to run the client and share their own status. Here’s where you are needed if you have a Starlink dish. At the moment, however, you have to be something of a nerd to run the client. The client software, which is available free on Github, only runs on Linux or on Linux subsytems on Windows or Macs (see Note to Nerds below).
If you are not a nerd but do want to share data in the interest of better connectivity, you probably will have to wait until there is a Windows and/or Mac native client available. I may try to put something together for Windows if there’s enough interest. If you would be willing to run a client in the background of your Windows or Mac machine to help populate this map and are not Linux-proficient, please fill out this form.
Note to nerds
Following the instructions on Github, it’s easy for any nerd to install this on a Linux machine. The instructions are for a newly-installed Raspberry PI 3B+. I don’t have a Linux machine (yet) but followed the instructions and was able to install in the Windows Linux Subsystem (WLS) using Ubuntu.
There is one caution, however: the script uses the Ookla Speedtest CLI. The current Windows version of the CLI crashes when it’s run in WLS Version 1. This is a known problem which Ookla says they will fix. I have verified that Linux version of the CLI does work in WLS Version 2.
However, before I upgraded my WLS to Version 2 (which is a pain), I developed a work around using the Windows CLI invoked from the Ubuntu shell script. If you’d like the work around, please use the comment field in this form to request it and I’ll send it to you. If there’s sufficient interest I’ll post on Github and/or give to the Starlink Statuspage developers to post.
What is the point of this post? That low-altitude satellites saturating the earth with 5G radiation is a good thing? Where is the science saying this is safe?
If better download speeds are what you’re after, the quality of wired service crushes wireless. Fiber is a mature technology with vastly more capability than wireless—fiber-optic cables have been proven to carry over a terabit of data per second, a rate wireless cannot touch. Chattanooga, TN and Longmont, CO have both successfully built out broadband fiber networks. Longmont has the fastest service in the nation.
The purpose of this post is to increase the value of somebody’s investment portfolio …, same reason as posts pushing the “vaccine”.