What is Starlink really worth? This is the question that everyone has been asking since the arrival of Elon Musk’s service in France. If the latter has already proven itself on many occasions, a team of Belgian and Italian researchers wanted to find out for sure. For several months, they therefore measured the power of satellite Internet according to the usual three factors: latency, transfer speed and general browsing performance.
Three scenarios were set up: a “natural” test without loading data, a second with a load of 100 MB and a final one with a load comparable to watching a streaming video. So, on the latency side, Starlink fulfills all its promises. In the first scenario, the latter displays between 46 milliseconds and 52 milliseconds latencywith a minimum score of 20.5 milliseconds.
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You can play cloud gaming without problems with Starlink
Starlink then showed 95 milliseconds of latency for the second test and finally 50 milliseconds for the last. As the researchers note, it is therefore very interesting that Starlink is below GeForce Now’s recommendations in this regard. Indeed, the cloud gaming service recommends a latency below 80 milliseconds to avoid in-game issues.
Excellent news for players, especially those in rural areas, who could therefore be tempted by Elon Musk’s satellite Internet. The study does not provide details on other cloud gaming services, but it’s a safe bet that Starlink’s performance is also satisfactory on these. The researchers also point out that on Ookla, the service displays a median speed of 178 Mb/s, for a maximum of 386 Mb/s.
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