Starlink Analysis
July 15, 2021
This document was created by the research group ROADMAP-5G at the Carinthia University of
Applied Sciences (CUAS) in June 2021. The used Starlink dish and modem were kindly provided
by Stereo Media.
1 Introduction
Since the emergence of 4G and 5G in the last years it seemed that for consumers, Internet access was
a settled eld. SpaceX with its division of Starlink did introduce a new satellite-based solution.
Starlink is a system enabling satellite-based Internet access in selected areas of the Earth. The
system is provided by SpaceX and consists of three parts:
1. The satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Currently, 1,635 of 11,914 planned satellites are
deployed and operational. They are located at an altitude between 540 and 570 km (Source).
2. The ground stations are in constant communication with the satellites. They are necessary
for providing Internet access and control information. There are currently 92 operational
ground stations (Source). They are connected to so-called PoPs (Points of Presence), which
act as interconnection points to the public data network (referred to as Internet in the rest
of the document). There are currently 52 operational PoPs (Source)
3. The user dishes and routers for providing communication between the user devices and the
satellites. The router is equipped with a Gigabit Ethernet port and WiFi for providing
connectivity to the user devices. The dish is connected to the router and is powered using
Power over Ethernet (PoE). The dish aligns itself towards the north to achieve the best
possible reception to potentially visible satellites.
The following gure shows an example of the initial measurement setup.
1
