Investigating Web Content Delivery Performance over Starlink
Rohan Bose (Technische Universität München)
Jinwei Zhao (University of Victoria)
Tanya Shreedhar (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Jianping Pan (University of Victoria)
Nitinder Mohan (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite ISPs promise universal Internet connectivity, yet their interaction with content delivery remains poorly understood. We present the first comprehensive measurement study decomposing Starlink's web content delivery performance decomposed across Point of Presence (PoP), DNS, and CDN layers. To quantify how satellite architecture disrupts terrestrial CDN assumptions, we conduct a measurement study spanning two years. We identify three distinct performance regimes based on infrastructure density. Regions with local content-rich PoPs achieve near-terrestrial latencies with the satellite segment dominating 80-90% of RTT. Infrastructure-sparse regions suffer cascading penalties: remote PoPs force distant resolver selection, which triggers CDN mislocalization, pushing latencies beyond 200 ms. Dense-infrastructure regions show minimal sensitivity to PoP changes. Leveraging Starlink's infrastructure expansion in early 2025 as a natural experiment, we demonstrate that relocating PoPs closer to user location reduces median page-fetch times by 60%. Our findings reveal that infrastructure proximity, not satellite coverage, influences web performance, requiring fundamental changes to CDN mapping and DNS resolution for satellite ISPs.
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