KO of Starlink to rural internet in Spain with 300Mb of speed where 4G gave 10

The first known Starlink client with active service in Spain shows how Elon Musk's satellite internet service offers speeds of over 300 Mb in a remote location where fiber or ADSL does not reach and 4G does not allow YouTube to be viewed in conditions .

Starlink began its landing in Spain in June 2020

Starlink's constellation of low-orbiting satellites reinvents satellite broadband, a technology that has existed for decades with very little success, given its enormous latency and download limitations. Registered in Spain as a company in June 2020 and as an internet operator before the CNMC in December of the same year, Starlink expected to start operations in our country during the past year, so in February 2021 it opened beta registrations. In June, it obtained permission from the Ministry to use the frequencies that would connect 3 ground stations located on Spanish soil with the satellites that crossed the country. The permits for the second necessary block of frequencies, the one that connects the satellites with the end users, did not arrive until the eve of kings of this 2022. Just one day later Starlink announced the start of the activity in Spain, although it has not been until this weekend when we have met the first user who has been using the service for 24 hours.

You can find out the technical details of how Starlink works in this article: How Starlink works in Spain: network of satellites and stations, antenna, router, speed and latency

First Starlink user in Spain

@wixens resides in an inland mountainous area between the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona. For the last 6 years he has relied on a connection through the 4G mobile network with which he obtained a maximum speed of 10 Mb and in which it was difficult to use basic services such as YouTube.

Despite the high price of Starlink, in June 2021 he decided to sign up for the beta, for which he paid €99 as a reservation deposit. A few weeks ago, Starlink notified him by mail that he could now complete the payment for the equipment, made up of the antenna and the router, of €499. 15 days later the package with the teams left California, which via DHL and via Germany arrived in Spain 5 days later.

@wixens has placed the dish of the antenna at the end of a stainless mast custom made by a workshop, to ensure that the antenna has open sky at an angle of 100º around it.

The service brings a powerful mobile app that reports the status of the service, shows a log of the interruptions that have occurred, the obstructions found by the antenna, devices connected to the router's Wi-Fi and complete statistics with the availability history of the service and graphs of both latency and speed, the first with the minimum, average and maximum latency recorded in the last few minutes and the second with the bandwidth used for both upload and download.

Finally, it has a tool to measure the speed within the operator's network that yields the chilling figure of 339 Mb download and 59 Mb upload, which places the Starlink connection at the height of fiber. Regarding latency, the graph shows a minimum of 19 ms, although with enough jitter when marking maximums of 70 ms. Regarding the IP address, it is assigned to Starlink Spain, SLU, with host name customer.mad2.mc.starlinkisp.net and goes out through Google's AS36492.

More speed and more expensive than expected

These speeds are well above what was expected. Although Starlink initially spoke of 50 to 150 Mb during the beta, in September its website announced speeds of 200 Mb. Elon Musk has already announced that the long-term goal is to make it viable to provide up to 10 Gbps to the user, a speed that is hard to believe now same.

Where changes are also expected is in the price, since currently it is necessary to face the cost of the equipment and a monthly payment that in Spain is more expensive than in the rest of the countries. Starlink adds €9 as a Regulatory Fee to the €99 that the monthly fee already costs, to denounce the high cost of spectrum usage fees in Spain.