Right now, one of the most popular playthings in our in-house dev team’s toybox is the Starlink satellite we’ve sourced from Elon Musk’s Space X offshoot, and we couldn’t be happier with the results…
What is Starlink?
Starlink is the satellite division of SpaceX, providing all manner of satellite and connectivity services to the likes of governments, private companies as well as individuals.
Just like the old ‘Sky dishes’ you’d see on the sides of houses up and down the street, the only physical hardware required is a satellite dish. And given that Starlink now allows dishes to be moved for an additional charge, ‘Voice over Satellite’ has the potential for super-simple deployment in a variety of circumstances…
Mobile businesses
Festivals, campsites, events.
Temporary sites
Construction, retail, events, travel.
Rural businesses
(Where broadband services are unavailable or too slow).
Urban areas
(Where laying new cables is too expensive, complex or slow).
What did Voip Unlimited test?
We ran our Starlink dish HARD!
For two weeks, we constantly pushed the connection to its limits, throwing as many concurrent calls at it as possible, to investigate how it would perform in a relatively real-world scenario.
ONE OF THE MOST IMPRESSIVE THINGS WE FOUND WAS THAT ONE SINGLE STARLINK DISH COULD MANAGE OVER 10,000 CALLS ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Even though ‘Voice over Satellite’ data travels over 1000 kilometres in its roundtrip into the atmosphere before coming back down, Starlink handled all that distance in a fraction of a second!
“We were expecting an experience like those old news interviews, with a dead pause between the speaker and response, but we were completely blown away!”
– Mark Pillow, Managing Director, Voip Unlimited
Average jitter of 12 ms and average RTP delay of 76 ms were far lower than initial estimates, and the connection only dropped .05% of calls (50 of 10,000 calls). All of which puts Starlink in line with multiple mobile operators and a viable alternative to other mobile connectivity solutions.
“Voip Unlimited is travelling exciting, hardly trodden ground. We’re doing it earlier than 99% of UK vendors and we’re leveraging all the expertise we’ve gained running our own private voice network, to develop an incredibly innovative product to market as soon as possible.”
– Mark Pillow
Can I buy a ‘Voice over Satellite’ service now?
Not just yet, but rest assured we’re just as excited for what the future holds as you are!
While we’re over the moon with the results of our tests, there’s still a fair bit of work left before Voice over Satellite will hit the market.
We’ll be working with our in-house development team to push those jitter and packet loss percentages as far down as possible, as well as optimising data pathways to increase reliability.
Want to hear about Voice over Satellite first?
Tell us about your business!
All told, the message from the team is ‘WATCH THIS SPACE… literally!’
This technology has the potential to revolutionise connectivity for a wide range of situations, bridging the gap between those who already have fibre services and those that need them, but for whatever reason – cost, distance, infrastructure etc. – are unable.
And specifically for our network of dealers and resellers, all the technical expertise that made this investigation possible is already available to you, especially for any complex or large deployments you’re exploring with end users.
The team’s broad and varied technical experience across voice and data, and our own privately owned, voice optimised network means we can solve your challenges as well as your customers’ with no muss or fuss. Just let us know on 01202 612 000!
