Starlink Performance through the Edge Router Lens

Low-Earth Orbit satellite-based Internet has become commercially available to end users, with Starlink being the most prominent provider. Starlink has been shown to exhibit a periodic pattern with a characteristic throughput drop on the boundaries of 15s intervals. A multitude of prior works hypothesize various root causes for this pattern, such as reordering and packet loss. Some works have attributed these effects to the edge router, advocating for explicit feedback to the transport layer. However, with the edge router being a proprietary Starlink device, it raises questions about the extent of its influence on periodic throughput drops, losses, and jitter, leaving us to wonder if we fully understand the underlying issues.