SpaceX Starlink has some hiccups as expected, but users are impressed

Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish and equipment in the Idaho panhandle's Coeur d'Alene National Forest. (credit: Wandering-coder)

When SpaceX opened the Starlink public beta last month, the company told users to expect "brief periods of no connectivity at all" over the first few months. It's one of the reasons that SpaceX calls this testing period the "Better Than Nothing" beta.

Early reports from Starlink beta testers confirm that users are suffering from this problem to some extent. But Starlink's overall performance has wowed beta testers, many of whom previously had no access to modern broadband speeds.

"Link stability is a little rough," Reddit user Exodatum wrote on the Starlink subreddit yesterday. "We're getting jumps bad enough to disconnect us from connection-sensitive servers every 5-10 minutes, but things like Netflix are working perfectly. We watched Airplane! as an inaugural stream and it was fabulous." (Buffering deployed by Netflix and other streaming services can keep videos running when there are brief Internet problems.)

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