New analysis from Ookla shows mixed results for SpaceX’s low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based Starlink services: A big jump in downlink speeds in the U.S. and Canada, tempered by a slowdown in the uplink.
Ookla reports that Starlink has boosted its median speed in the U.S. by nearly 40% compared to the first quarter of 2021 (from about 66 Mbps to nearly 91 Mbps), and increased its median downlink speed in Canada by around 60% (from about 62 Mbps to around 97 Mbps).
But during the same period of that dramatic increase in download speeds, upload speeds decreased significantly: In the U.S., Starlink’s upload speed fell nearly 33%, from 16.29 Mbps in the first quarter of 2021 to 9.33 Mbps in the first quarter of 2022, Ookla found. In Canada, uplink speeds fell by 23% compared to the first quarter of last year, going from 16.69 Mbps to 10.70 Mbps.
Median latency increased just a bit, from 40 milliseconds to 43 in the U.S. and from 51 ms to 55 ms in Canada. Ookla did note that “For many Starlink users, we suspect these changes are negligible.”
Ookla’s latest blog post looks at Starlink performance in a number of countries around the world, and the service is performing particularly well in Europe as of the first quarter of 2022, achieving a median download speed greater than 100 Mbps in every European country where it has commercial availability. Read more details from Ookla here.
Ookla’s testing from the fourth quarter of 2021 found that Starlink speeds had hit a median download speed of 100 Mbps in the United States, which achieves a service tier baseline for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program.
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