Horizon

Abstract

Starlink has deployed over 7,800 satellites serving millions of subscribers, yet predicting its performance remains an open challenge. Rapid orbital dynamics, frequent handovers, and weather-induced signal attenuation create variability that existing models, built on a handful of instrumented terminals in limited regions, cannot capture at global scale. We present Horizon, the first global-scale machine learning system for predicting LEO satellite Internet performance. Our key insight is that crowdsourced measurement platforms, while noisier than controlled experiments, provide the geographic diversity necessary to build globally generalizable models. Horizon integrates 11 months of measurements from M-Lab and Cloudflare spanning 90+ countries with meteorological data and satellite orbital propagation features. On a fully held-out one-week temporal window, Horizon achieves mean absolute errors of 17.76 ms for latency and 25.63 Mbps for throughput; on a standard 80/20 split it outperforms all baselines, including adaptations of state-of-the-art architectures. Feature importance analysis reveals that geographic position dominates prediction, with latitude alone contributing 42-46%, while weather features account for 14-15%, quantifying the impact of atmospheric conditions on Ku/Ka-band links. Leave-one-location-out experiments confirm that Horizon generalizes to regions absent from training, enabling performance estimation where measurement infrastructure does not yet exist. Our dataset and pipeline are publicly available, providing a foundation for global LEO network performance visibility.