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SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (17 children)

So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?

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  • [+] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (14 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (13 children)

    That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.

    In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.

    How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?

    Is it because latency does not scale in that way?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    Is it because latency does not scale in that way?

    Yes, your understanding is fundamentally flawed. Starlink adds a fixed latency on top, if you ping to a server was 2ms with fiber and 52ms with starlink, then your ping to a server that would be 100ms with fiber would be 150ms with starlink

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
    1. Run a traceroute like traceroute cnn com
    2. Kill that by ctrl-c at the third line.
    3. Ping that third IP address.

    Don't try to ping UK.battle.net or your numbers will be skewed by everything in between.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    About 5ms.

    Based on the various replies, it sounds like the poster I was originally replying to does not mean pings in any context.

    They just mean in this context. Along optimal routes. Right?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Of course they don't mean in every case. Yeah, if you have to go halfway around the world from two addresses that are very far away from hubs, Starlink might be better. 99.99999% of the time this isn't happening though and fiber will be better. There are situations for some people where it's worth it. Fiber is better for the average case though, and it's where money should be invested.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    You're probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).

    Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.

    My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    It depends on the instance (people can make them in 4 regions of the world) but 90ms is common for US west and east, for me.

    • Cloudflare.com: 5ms
    • Google.com: 24ms
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That makes sense then. When people talk about their ISP ping, they're usually talking about how long it takes to get out of the ISP's network. So that 5ms Cloudflare ping is likely pretty close to what people would consider your internet's ping.

    Speedtest.net is a really common tool for measuring this, since it will automatically check where the closest server is. For your connection, any ping above 5ms you can probably assume is based on your physical distance to the server, or latency on the server's end. I'm guessing Google doesn't have a server quite as close to you as Cloudflare

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Thanks for the details! This makes sense now. I started asking questions because it seemed wild that the only ping I pay attention to, the one shown in a game I play, would be up to 4.5 seconds on starlink. I guess it would be ~250ms at the top of the range they quoted.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My average latency on Starlink over the past year is 32 ms. It varies throughout the day from around 20 to 40 ms.

    If you are getting 90ms on fiber, you are either pinging a server that's a long ways away or something is very wrong.

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