Impact of Weather on Satellite Communication: Evaluating Starlink Resilience

TL;DR

This study investigates how weather conditions, specifically rain and cloud cover, affect Starlink satellite internet performance in Oulu, Finland, revealing significant throughput degradation due to rain and a negative correlation with cloud cover.

Contribution

It provides a detailed empirical analysis of weather impacts on Starlink's throughput, addressing previous gaps in understanding weather resilience in extreme conditions.

Findings

Rain reduces uplink throughput by over 52% and downlink by nearly 38%.

Cloud cover negatively correlates with throughput, with higher cloud cover causing about 20% lower performance.

Round-trip time remains unaffected by weather conditions.

Abstract

Satellite communications have emerged as one of the most feasible solutions to provide global wireless coverage and connect the unconnected. Starlink dominates the market with over 7,000 operational satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and offers global high-speed and low-latency Internet service for stationary and mobile use cases, including in-motion connectivity for vehicles, vessels, and aircraft. Starlink terminals are designed to handle extreme weather conditions. Starlink recommends a flat high performance (FHP) terminal for users living in areas with extreme weather conditions. The earlier studies evaluated Starlink's FHP throughput for stationary and in-motion users without providing a detailed analysis of how weather affects its performance. There remains a need to investigate the impact of weather on FHP's throughput. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by analyzing the impact of weather on Starlink's performance in Oulu, Finland, a city located in Northern Europe near the Arctic Circle. Our measurements reveal that rain degrades median uplink and downlink throughput by 52.27% and 37.84%, respectively. On the contrary, there was no noticeable impact on the round-trip time. Additionally, we also examine the impact of cloud cover on the Starlink throughput. The linear regression analysis reveals the negative relationship between throughput and cloud cover. The cloud cover of up to 12.5% has around 20% greater throughput than the cloud cover of 87.5%