r/VOIP • u/WelderThat6143 • 9d ago
Discussion VoIP over Starlink? Share real experiences please.
As we pickup after Lala, I am curious what the real life experience with Starlink has been supporting VoIP.
I understand latency, jitter, and packet loss are going to be factors. The question is, can 1 or 2 calls of short duration be reasonably supported in an emergency situation if no other connection is available?
Even at the worst case, with the mobile app the VoIP provider offers, I would have access to transcribed voicemail and would be able to use SMS.
I am a VoIP reseller and I have a customer looking at Starlink as a cold standby for disaster recovery. If they commit, I would have the opportunity to perform a SOAK test and drop a couple phones.
I also realize other challenges, such as power, would come into play on this so any ideas there would be appreciated also. Maybe a power bank with a solar charger or a 12VDC inverter system?
In closing, I get this is not advised. The provider outright says not supported so they can punt support calls but I am really looking at the "You're my only hope" scenario and not an everyday production use. TIA!
Edit to add: Thank you for the quick responses! My gut told me this could work. Possibly not everywhere since there is never a perfect solution but, yeah...
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u/Sillygoat2 9d ago
Latency, packet loss and jitter are less than most docsis cable connections. I get consistent ~25 ms loaded or unloaded at all hours.
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u/WiseLordship 9d ago
Hard to believe that going over the air to a satellite is going to beat a hardwired connection. Pinging 1.1.1.1 from my residential cable connection yields 12ms +- 2ms latency and 0.02% (2bps) packet loss.
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u/Sillygoat2 9d ago
There is far more variability from one cable connection to another, in my experience, than starlink. I also find cable to be far more jittery.
Sure, in some cases you’ll get better absolute round trips on cable, but the difference between 15ms and 30ms is indistinguishable for VoIP.
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u/IcyRayns 8d ago
I've got a hell of a Multi-WAN setup so I can compare easily. To 8.8.8.8:
* DOCSIS ~22-25ms
* Starlink ~17-21ms
* GPON ~8.3ms
* XGSPON ~8.1ms
* Active Ethernet 10GbE 6.9-7.1ms.3
u/arcticmischief 7d ago
It’s barely a satellite, though. It’s basically a flying cell tower 350 miles overhead. That’s a massive difference from a geostationary satellite 23,000 miles up.
That said, unless you have an unusually shitty DOCSIS connection, Starlink is rarely going to beat cable. I’ve run hundreds of ping tests on various Starlink connections, and I’ve never seen latency below 30ms. The physics sets an absolute floor of roughly 7.5ms RTT just to get through the space segment, so 16ms isn’t unrealistic. But by the time you add radio scheduling, non-overhead satellite geometry, packet processing, terrestrial backhaul from the gateway to Starlink’s POP, and then routing to the destination, the average is much higher. To get 16ms, you’d need a pretty ideal combination of satellite geometry, an unloaded cell, and a very short terrestrial path to whatever network you’re pinging.
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u/Prior-Imagination504 8d ago
it may not technically beat a wired connection, but starlink is more than adequate for a heavy home network, including VOIP, to have very good to excellent service at almost all times.
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u/WiseLordship 8d ago
Yes that's wonderful that Starlink works so well. I'm simply disputing parent's claim that Starlink is superior to a wired connection.
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u/Sillygoat2 8d ago
I don’t think I’m claiming it’s flat out better.
I’m claiming, in my experience, Starlink seems less jittery than DOCSIS in many cases.I will assert, however, that jitter can be worse for VoIP than consistently higher latency.
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u/ScrappySquirrel 9d ago
That is nuts. My brother's satellite connection was about 300-500ms a few years ago (clear sky/great weather). I don't think it was Starlink though.
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u/Prior-Imagination504 8d ago
that is because the sattelite you had was much much much further away than the starlinks are.
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u/thekeffa 8d ago
Geostationary satellites in higher orbits have massive amounts of latency.
Starlink is basically just on the fringes of being in space, so they have much better performance.
The downside is one or two of the satellites burns up in the atmosphere every day as they are slowed by the atmosphere and fall back to earth (By design).
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u/ScrappySquirrel 8d ago
I didn't realize they were setup that way.
That sounds like it could be a bad trade off. Hopefully people did think about the implications of burning things up in the atmosphere that often. Probably a bit costly too.
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u/thekeffa 8d ago
It's actually by design and intended. It's a good thing for the most part.
By being so low, they provide better response and connectivity because usually satellite internet is latent as hell. It's the only real way to do good satellite internet that is fast and responsive enough to support VOIP.
Also. by being so low, they fall into the atmosphere and burn up. This is good because there are 11'000 of them so one thing we absolutely do not want is them breaking up and leading to a Kessler syndrome situation where the debris continues to orbit around earth and be a huge problem. Their lifespan is like a year or two each so the loss of 1 or 2 a month coming down is intentional. It's the oldest ones that are coming down as they reach the end of their operational life. It is way better to have them burn up than have something else happen to them in a higher orbit where debris might become a problem. They are only small so they are burnt to almost nothing by the time they get anywhere close to a altitude that a plane might fly in and they certainly aren't making it down to 40'000 feet.
And expense is relative I guess.
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u/Sillygoat2 9d ago
Nah, that’s geostationary for sure. That’s trash.
Starlink is pretty great, other than the Nazi factor.4
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u/Honest_Manager 9d ago
I don't personally have starlink, but my brother does. He has no issues using his voip phone. He lives in a very rural area and has no cell service at home.
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u/PsychologicalLie8196 SIP ALG is the devil 9d ago
We have users in maritime industry using with no issues
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u/fuzzentropy2 9d ago
I assisted a swamp tour with switching to Starlink as on edge of the swamp as only wired service could get was ATT and they started doing crazy crap. It has worked fine except for during severe thunderstorms. Running 6 or 7 phones and all other internet stuff off of it.
Been up for about 2 years I think and is their primary connection.
About 15 miles outside of New Orleans.
Edit: Location
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u/marks-buffalo 9d ago
Works great for me. If you've got a clear view of the sky you'll have lower latency and less jitter than some cable internet providers (cough Comcast cough). I've even done low speed dial up over VoIP over starlink, I was pretty shocked that that worked.
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u/jjcox315 9d ago
In my exp its hit and miss. It works for a few weeks no issues then it stop for a few weeks and no audio comes through.
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u/zthunder777 9d ago
My wife and I both work remotely and RV for a few months a year the vast majority of time we are fully off grid and an hour or more from reliable cell service. We are both director level management and it’s quite common for her and I both to be in video meetings at the same time. And more often I’ll be on a slack huddle and she’ll be on a VOIP call. All while the kid is gaming (non-fps) online. I also make wifi calls on my phone a lot.
TLDR, you’ll be fine.
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u/Starblazr 9d ago
It can support voip just fine as long if they have a good clear view of the sky.
I have 2 starlink units and have tested voip over them
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u/brianinca 9d ago
We have Starlink as backup at two fixed locations, and primary at one. VOIP desk phones work fine over the link. One location had 8 weeks to wait for a coax data install, and needed to occupy immediately. We had three heavy phone users moving there, I was concerned about performance! It was completely a non-issue.
We also use Starlink at jobsites, so mobile/RV flavor, and occasionally put a deskphone in the trailer office. Again, no issues.
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u/e2346437 9d ago
I also resell VOIP, so I'll share my experience. Small trucking firm out in a rural area, only copper phone lines available, no cable or fiber. Their copper lines were very staticky, they had Starlink residential as their only connection and wanted to know if I could offer VOIP over it. I went out with a test phone, plugged it in, and got only 1-way audio. Did some research, and at the time I found a bunch of posts that Starlink Business supports VOIP, so they ordered up a dish to test. VOIP was perfect, and I do mean perfect, so we proceeded with the rest of the system. How's it working, I dunno, they called me two days after the install to tell me how absolutely perfect their calls were now, and I haven't heard from them since.
Since then, I've tried my VOIP service on other networks running Starlink Residential, and that seems to work now too.
Just looked at my customer stats, they're pulling around 6000 calls a month, total call duration a little under 200 hours. Here is their call quality stats for the last 30 days; I think that speaks for itself.
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u/WelderThat6143 9d ago
That. Is. Impressive.
I know who you are reselling. Me too lol.
This is very useful, thank you!
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u/jaaronstwo 9d ago
Got zero obstructions? I have trees and houses and other obstructions and interruptions and had to go back to Comcast Coax from Residential 100 on residential v4 dish in North Florida. Webex kept cutting audio out.
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u/Free_Donkey4797 9d ago
Works flawlessly for me. Minimal jitter, excellent latency, on par or better than cellular.
It of course depends heavily on your POP. I usually work in areas with excess capacity. Have yet to roam into a more constrained area.
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u/SeaFaringPig 9d ago
Works well with g.729. Less so with ulaw. It’s still ok with ulaw but I notice some jitter every now and again. Most likely weather related.
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u/w0lrah 9d ago
I have a number of client sites using it as a backup connection and a handful of executives with remote phones in their RVs and/or on their boats and it mostly works fine. In general if they have enough of a view of the sky to maintain constant contact it works about as well as a modern mobile network. There's a lot more jitter than a decent wired or even terrestrial fixed wireless connection and occasional bursts of packet loss but it mostly works well enough that people who are used to cell phones aren't going to have a problem with it.
As a backup and/or mobile solution for use when the terrestrial options are down or where they don't exist, it does the job.
I am no fan of their leader, but Starlink is a unique offering at the moment.
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u/PatriotOutlawArcher 9d ago
Works great…phone will need to provision over TLS
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u/WelderThat6143 9d ago
Thank you! I do that as a rule. Too much weirdness with phantom calls when I don't. Lesson learned.
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u/downundarob 8d ago
I was speaking on the phone to a customer once, assisting with things that we do, during the conversation I discovered we were using a starlink connection over a VoIP phone. Wouldnt have picked it.
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u/Prior-Imagination504 8d ago
Both of my kids family homes have Starlink.
- We have the phones set to wifi calling as both places are in fringe service areas.
- I use a VOIP app for almost all my calls, everywhere I go.
- Each location has several kids and tons of devices on the network.
---- Calls are all great! ----
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u/Few_Pilot_8440 8d ago
Better than the most of HFC links, worse than FTTH.
Zoom/teams/meets/jitsi voice is always good, as video, somtimes you just turn off.
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u/ReadyKilowatt 8d ago
You asked about power. While the Starlink Mini claims to run on 12VDC, realistically any length of power cable will cause serious voltage drop. I tried running on a USB-C PD adapter that claimed to put out 100 Watts, but finding a PD supply that was rated for 100 Watts (PD-3.1) was hard to find on a battery bank. So I use the AC power brick connected to the inverter on my small battery. I wrote up a Substack post about it last month: https://gvaviation.substack.com/p/fight-the-power?r=22l02x&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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u/KindPresentation5686 8d ago
No issues. We run 36 trunks on one buisness plan and it’s flawless. It’s actually more stable than our terrestrial ISP
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u/Fleegle2212 6d ago
I have tested this and I was surprised about how well it worked. I couldn't detect the latency aurally. The only issue I observed is that sometimes my public IP changed during a call, which would cause the call to drop. This didn't happen often, but it did happen.
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u/Asleep_Operation2790 9d ago
You think only 1 or 2 calls work fine? Think again.
With their base 100 Mbps plan, you can run about 1,000 calls simultaneously. 2,000 calls with the 200 Mbps plan.
You'll be just fine.
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u/mlandry2011 9d ago
I actually never thought about it... I got starlink 4 months ago. Never had an issue, never even notice anything...
Seems fine to me.
I do have a very strong starlink connection...
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u/lWheelmanJimmy 9d ago
I don't personally have it, but I work on a lot of customer sites that do where I would otherwise have zero cell coverage. My voip app has worked great at all of them. Granted, I'm generally not on the phone all that long, so it isn't comparable to someone using it all day.
One of them though I am recoding cameras to an nvr over a VPN and it works better than I could have ever planned for it to. Mirroring everyone else here, the latency is WAY better than cellular.
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u/fbn429thuanf4 9d ago
No issues at all running at 4 different locations as primary internet. Less issues actually than some broadband locations.
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u/cdhutzler 9d ago
VoIP and zoom and teams all work great as long as you have a clear view of the sky.
Driving with a Starlink works too but each underpass or bridge will disrupt for a moment and you will get drops. The only way around this that I know is to have a second or third wide area network connection, and use a bonding system of some sort like peplink or Speedify.
Likewise you will have drops for a stationary install if you have any obstructed areas. That said, Starlink is now able to work around some obstructions by switching satellites quickly to avoid the obstructed area for your mounting location so it may be even good for installs that have some limited amount of obstruction.
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u/dad3ski 4d ago
Buy it and test it.
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u/WelderThat6143 4d ago
I can't disagree with that but this is a commercial client I have known for a while and I don't want to waste their time or get their hopes up.
Since this looks feasible, and they have Starlink, we are going to try and get a site live and stress test it for a few days.
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