I noticed a huge improvement just switching to stock BBR to my Starlink as well. During a particularly congested time I was bouncing between 5 to 12 Mbps via Starlink. With BBR enabled I got a steady 12. The main problem is that you need BBR on the server for this to work, as a client using Starlink I don't have any control over what all the servers I connect to are doing. (Other than my one server I was testing with).
I like Huston's idea of a Starlink-tuned BBR, I wonder if it's a traffic shaping that SpaceX could apply themselves in their ground station datacenters? That'd involve messing with the TCP stream though, maybe a bad idea.
The fact that Starlink has this 15 second switching built in is pretty weird, but you can definitely see it in every continuous latency measure. Even weirder it seems to be globally synchronized: all the hundreds of thousands of dishes are switching to new satellites the same millisecond, globally. Having a customized BBR aware of that 15 second cycle is an interesting idea.
I would guess that that would be beneficial, but again only if youre using a TCP vpn, which is suboptimal for other reasons. I think it was called meltdown.
If that is all you have access to though, im sure it would help.
It's designed to mitigate certain methods of blocking-via-throttling.
I looked into it for a report I wrote a while back, and I was surprised to find that nobody has made something purpose-built for greedy TCP congestion handling in order to improve performance at the expense of others. If there is such a thing, I couldn't find it. Perhaps I'm a little too cynical in my expectations!
Maybe TCP-over-TCP is so bad that it's not worth it?
I like Huston's idea of a Starlink-tuned BBR, I wonder if it's a traffic shaping that SpaceX could apply themselves in their ground station datacenters? That'd involve messing with the TCP stream though, maybe a bad idea.
The fact that Starlink has this 15 second switching built in is pretty weird, but you can definitely see it in every continuous latency measure. Even weirder it seems to be globally synchronized: all the hundreds of thousands of dishes are switching to new satellites the same millisecond, globally. Having a customized BBR aware of that 15 second cycle is an interesting idea.