internet

In 2009, a company in South Africa proved a homing pigeon was faster than an ADSL connection, flying a 4 GB USB flash drive to prove it.

Besides IEEE's speculative work, nobody's actually re-run the 'bird vs. Internet' race in over a decade.

Now that I have gigabit fiber, I thought I'd give it a try.

Video

I published a video with all the details—and even more background on the graceful birds used in the experiment—over on my YouTube channel:

If you've ever had to transfer a file from one computer to another over the Internet, with minimal fuss, there are a few options. You could use scp or rsync if you have SSH access. You could use Firefox Send, or Dropbox, or iCloud Drive, or Google Drive, and upload from one computer, and download on the other.

But what if you just want to zap a file from point A to point B? Or what if—like me—you want to see how fast you can get an individual file from one place to another over the public Internet?

This blog post is a lightly edited transcript from my most recent YouTube video, in which I explain some of Starlink's growing pains: slower speeds due to oversubscription, design challenges with their v2 hardware, and a major bet on much larger v2 sats and a rocket (Starship) that has yet to complete an orbital flight.

The video is embedded below, and the transcript follows:

I got Starlink during the Public beta, a little over a year ago.

I set up Dishy on my roof, I set up some advanced monitoring and tested it as a backup Internet connection, but ultimately passed it along to my cousin, who's using it on her farm.

After watching Level1Techs' THE FORBIDDEN ROUTER II - DIAL-UP BY DAWN video, I wanted to do some DNS benchmarking on my local network.

Since I run Pi-hole locally, and rely on it for local DNS resolution, I wanted to have a baseline so I could compare performance over time.

In the video, Wendell mentioned the use of Gibson's Windows-only DNS Benchmark tool. But that's Windows-only. Or maybe Linux under WINE, but definitely not a native / open source tool that's easily used across different platforms.

I looked around and settled on bulldohzer—for now, at least—as it's easy to install anywhere Node.js runs. I have Node.js installed via Homebrew on my Mac, so I just ran:

npm install --location=global bulldohzer

Then I could run a benchmark against Google and my own local DNS resolver (Pi-Hole):

May 5th Update: this feature is now official, and is called "Portability." To enable it, you will need to pay an extra $25/month, though I haven't been charged yet despite using the feature. Starlink says mobility (using Dishy while in motion) is not yet supported and will void your kit's warranty.

I've logged into my Starlink.com account, and I now see a note that reads Click "Manage Service Options" to add Portability. — that screen leads to this Starlink Portability FAQ page with more details. I haven't signed up for it yet, and I'm waiting to see what happens next billing cycle... I still can't update the service address to my cousin's location.

Today's video is about Starlink—I've had an active subscription since last February, and as it's been a year, I figured I should post an update.

The tl;dr: when I had a new roof put on late last summer, I took down 'Dishy McFlatface', but I haven't put the dish back up. I have been holding out hope I could transfer my hardware to my cousin, who lives on a farm 70 miles away, and only gets 300 Kbps upload on her DSL, but so far that seems to be a pipe dream.

In the video below, I outline four problems that have tempered my optimism when it comes to SpaceX's Starlink Internet service:

The rest of this post is a lightly-edited transcript of the video.

For a recent project, I needed to add cellular connectivity to a Raspberry Pi (actually, an entire cluster... but that's a story for a future time!).

I figured I'd document the process in this blog post so people who follow in my footsteps don't need to spend quite as much time researching. This post is the culmination of 40+ hours of reading, testing, and head-scratching.

There doesn't seem to be any good central resource for "4G LTE and Linux" out there, just a thousand posts about the ABC's of getting an Internet connection working through a 4G modem—but with precious little explanation about why or how it works. (Or why someone should care about random terms like PPP, ECM, QMI, or MBIM, or why someone would choose qmi_wwan over cdc_ether, or ... I could go on).

Hopefully you can learn something from my notes. Or point out places where I'm glaringly wrong :)

SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber.

SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish above—and I've been testing it and comparing it to my Cable internet.

I have Raspberry Pis monitoring my Internet—one on Starlink, and one on Spectrum. And I also have a power monitor measuring power usage. And I've tracked everything since day one to see if weather like snow and thunderstorms affect service, and how Starlink compares to Cable.

Here's the bottom line: Most of the time, I couldn't tell I was using Starlink. And that's good. Everything felt the same.

Internet Service Providers are almost universally despised. They've pushed for the FCC to continue defining 25 Mbps as "high use" broadband, and on top of that they overstate the quality of service they provide. A recently-released map of broadband availability in the US paints a pretty dire picture:

Here in St. Louis—where I guess I should count my lucky stars we have 'high use' broadband available—I have only two options: I can get 'gigabit' cable Internet from Spectrum, or 75 megabit DSL from AT&T.

That's it.

And you're probably thinking, "Gigabit Internet is great, stop complaining!"