Starlink Ping Test
Measure your satellite connection against 14 regions worldwide. Pay attention to the jitter column rather than the average — with low-Earth-orbit internet, consistency is the metric that decides whether a game is playable.
Measures round-trip time to 14 cloud regions
Run this several times across the day. A single result tells you very little on satellite internet, because capacity is shared per cell and your dish changes satellite every few seconds. The spread between your best and worst run is more informative than any single number.
Why low-Earth orbit changed satellite latency completely
Traditional satellite internet places its satellites in geostationary orbit, about 35,800 km above the equator, so they appear to hang motionless over one spot. That fixed position makes the ground equipment simple, but the distance is brutal: a signal has to travel up and back down twice for a round trip, covering more than 140,000 km. Even at the speed of light that costs roughly half a second before any equipment is involved, which is why those services have always been unusable for gaming and awkward for video calls.
Starlink flies at a few hundred kilometres instead. The physical distance stops being the dominant factor entirely — the travel time to the satellite and back is a handful of milliseconds, leaving the ground network as the main contributor, exactly like a terrestrial connection. That single change is what moved satellite internet from 600 ms to something in the same league as cable.
The trade-off is that a low satellite does not stay put. It crosses the sky in minutes, so the constellation needs thousands of them and your terminal has to keep switching between them. Those switches are where the characteristic Starlink jitter comes from.
| Connection | Typical ping | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Fibre | 5-20 ms | Very low jitter. The benchmark everything else is measured against. |
| Cable / VDSL | 15-35 ms | Stable, though shared local capacity can raise evening latency. |
| Starlink (LEO) | 25-60 ms | Good average, periodic spikes from satellite handovers and peak-hour cell congestion. |
| 5G fixed wireless | 20-60 ms | Comparable to Starlink, but varies far more with distance to the mast and tower load. |
| Geostationary satellite | 600 ms+ | Fine for browsing and streaming, unusable for real-time games or natural conversation. |
What is actually playable on Starlink
The honest answer is that the average is rarely the problem. At 35 ms you are within the comfortable range for every genre. What decides playability is how often the connection produces a spike, and how badly a given game reacts to one.
Works well: MMOs, strategy and 4X games, turn-based titles, racing, survival and co-op shooters, and anything with server-side confirmation rather than frame-by-frame contest. A brief spike in these produces a small hitch, not a lost fight.
Workable with compromises: battle royales and casual shooters. You will notice occasional rubber-banding and a hit that registers late, but most rounds play normally.
Genuinely disadvantaged: tactical shooters played at a high level and fighting games. Both punish variance rather than delay — rollback netcode absorbs a steady 40 ms far better than an unpredictable 25-90 ms, and a single handover during a duel costs the round.
Getting the best out of it
Clear the view first. Use the obstruction tool in the Starlink app and treat every reported blockage as a latency problem rather than a speed problem. A branch that clips the dish for two seconds every few minutes will not dent your download figure, but it will drop packets exactly when a satellite passes behind it.
Use Ethernet. On a connection that already carries unavoidable jitter, adding wireless variability on top is the difference between playable and frustrating. This matters more on Starlink than on fibre.
Manage the queue. If a household download can saturate the link, small game packets end up behind it. A router with sensible queue management prevents that, and it is the one piece of local equipment that genuinely helps here.
Pick your server region by test, not by assumption. Starlink routes through ground stations that may not be where you expect, so the closest game region geographically is not always the fastest in practice. Run the regional test above and choose from the result.
Skip the "ping booster." Products that reroute your traffic through their own network add a hop. On a connection whose latency problem is satellite handover, that hop cannot help and usually hurts.
How to tell congestion from a hardware problem
Test at three different times: early morning, mid-afternoon and mid-evening. If the average climbs steadily toward the evening and returns overnight, that is cell congestion — shared capacity in your area, not a fault, and not something a new router fixes.
If instead the average stays flat but you see sharp isolated spikes at any hour, look at obstructions and at the dish's alignment. And if every region including the nearest reads high at all hours, check whether the router is doing something unhelpful — double NAT, an active VPN, or an overloaded queue.
Starlink latency questions
What is a normal Starlink ping?
Most users see between 25 and 60 ms to a nearby server, depending on how far they are from the ground station their dish routes through and how busy the cell is. That is dramatically better than traditional satellite internet, which sits above 600 ms, and roughly comparable to a mid-range cable connection.
Why does Starlink latency jump every few seconds?
Because your dish does not stay locked to one satellite. Low-Earth-orbit satellites cross the sky quickly, so the terminal hands your connection to a new one at short, regular intervals. Each handover can produce a brief spike or a dropped packet. It is invisible while browsing and very visible in a competitive shooter.
Is Starlink good enough for gaming?
For most genres, yes. MMOs, strategy games, racing, co-op shooters and single-player games with online components all play fine at 30-50 ms. Competitive tactical shooters and fighting games are where the handover jitter costs you, not the average latency. If you are choosing between Starlink and nothing, it is a transformative upgrade; if you are choosing between Starlink and fibre, fibre wins on consistency.
Why is my Starlink ping worse in the evening?
Each satellite cell serves a limited number of users, and capacity is shared. During peak hours more terminals in your area compete for the same beam, which increases queueing delay. This is congestion rather than a fault, and it is why the same dish can read 28 ms at 6 a.m. and 70 ms at 9 p.m.
Do obstructions affect ping or only speed?
Both, but the latency effect is worse. A tree clipping the edge of the dish's field of view causes brief signal loss during the moments a satellite passes behind it. That produces dropped packets and sharp spikes rather than a steadily higher average — exactly the pattern that ruins real-time applications. The obstruction map in the Starlink app is worth taking seriously.
Will a VPN or gaming router improve Starlink latency?
A VPN adds a hop and almost always makes it worse. A router with sensible queue management can help, because it prevents a large download from filling the buffer and delaying everything behind it. But neither addresses the two real sources of Starlink jitter — satellite handovers and cell congestion — because both happen upstream of your equipment.