(01-22-2025, 01:54 AM)Punatang Wrote: Terracore I'm guessing you have the answer to this: Why is the upload so much slower than he download? Is it the gravity? 
There's actually a lot of reasons for this. In the old days of dial-up, the only type of "high speed" internet available to most consumers was satellite, but the end-user terrestrial dishes lacked the ability to upload anything, so the consumer needed to maintain a dial-up connection to their servers to provide the data upload necessary to make the internet work. The download speeds were amazingly fast for their time, but all of the upload was handled by copper wires.
When broadband finally happened, most people's first experience was through their cable TV provider. Cable TV technology was primarily a one-way service. Nobody was transmitting video from their TV to the cable company. The internet worked the same way, very little of the available bandwidth was allocated to uploads, and almost all of it was used for packet communication. In fact, the upload speeds weren't much better than dial-up. Nobody cared much, because nobody was uploading huge files. If you wanted to run a web server, you couldn't do it off your cable TV connection.
By the time fiber rolled out, the industry "standard" was to allocate 50% of the download speed to uploads. if you had a 100 Mbs connection, your upload speed was usually limited to 50Mbs. But it was full-duplex, so both of them could go full throttle at the same time. It was only a few years ago (4 or 5?) where providers started allocating as much to uploads as downloads.
So the industry has a standard of allocating resources in this manner. As far as Starlink goes, it may have the capability to match upload and download speeds (I don't know) but it's reasonable to assume that since most people consume much more data than they contribute to the internet, the upload speeds are a representation of the limit of the available bandwidth the network has. (If they increase the upload speeds, the drag on the system might decrease download speeds, which is the opposite of what most people would want). Alternatively, it could be a limitation of the hardware. Maybe a different or larger dish would be required. Musk likes to play online games so he's more interested in latency, and it does take a minimum amount of upload speed for low latency, and apparently Starlink's upload is "fast enough" as is. Like I said, most people consume data. At times, Netflix uses almost 10% of the nation's download internet capacity. But virtually nobody uploads video to netflix.
All that being said, I wanted to post my experience using Starlink yesterday. We were at remote location where the cell internet was almost zero for several hours and I still have 40GB to burn on the Starlink for my plan so I decided to take it with me. It performed as I expected (very well) and as I was putting it in the trunk of the car to leave, just before I turned it off, I wanted to see what the performance would be like in my trunk. Not exactly a clear view of the sky. It was orientated perpendicular to "aligned" and only about 20% of the dish was outside the trunk. The rest was obscured inside of it. My d/l speed was still 72 Mbs.
