[walrus01]

for a very brief period of time my starlink connection was exiting the cgnat to the internet in chicago (the first hop that was a public IP was 1-2ms from various ISPs' looking glasses in chicago), and the latency matched for return trip to LEO/back, down to earth station in the pacific northwest, and then transport circuit to chicago and back. Then after a couple of days it went back to Seattle.

[snurfer]

Is your impression that the service is improving?

[We are South of the 45th parallel, by the way.] I think service is improving for us; we don't get the regular 5-10 second disconnects that were occurring every 10 or 15 minutes. According to fast.com, our loaded and unloaded latency has improved. Most media consumption (web pages, video, etc) compares favorably to a terrestrial service.

However, Xbox Live (the limit of our online gaming) is still inconsistent. We get disconnected from game servers and from Live itself pretty regularly.

[walrus01]

It is definitely much better since mid January with increasing satellite density. Getting the antenna to a really high position on your roof with no tree obstructions around is important. Right now it's averaging about 0.28% loss to Seattle over the past 3 hours. But there are still some very brief periods of 4-5 second hiccups. Based on the monitoring systems I have running, it's more like 0.00% loss for long extended periods of the time now, and then a minute or two with about 10% loss. I haven't tested it a lot for online gaming but realtime voice/video conference type stuff all appears to work normally.

There is presently a very big difference in simultaneous satellite density and lack of gaps at 49N vs 44-45N, however.