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With the recent success of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, measuring their performance has been of great interest to the community. While stationary Starlink performance has been extensively assessed on a globalized view, mobile - in-motion - usage is relatively new. A first look at its performance has only been taken by three studies so far. In this paper, we take a comprehensive look at mobile Starlink performance from the measurement perspective by answering the following three research questions: (1) How does mobile Starlink performance differ in different regions of the world? (2) How does the mobile performance compare to stationary performance? (3) How does obstruction impact mobile performance? To answer these questions, we conduct our own 300 km long test-drive on the German Autobahn (highway) with car velocities up to 140 km/h. We compare our results to the datasets of the other three studies and to stationary measurements. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to deeper analyze the impact of obstructions on the performance. For this, we map bridges crossing the highway to our measurements and find that these short total obstructions cause significant burst packet loss, RTT spikes, and throughput drops. We show that mobility-induced instabilities can have a severe negative impact on the performance of higher-level applications such as HTTP bulk file transfer.
Laniewski et al. (Wed,) studied this question.