Inside Starlink's gRPC API: Latency, Obstruction & Live Stats in your Router

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Starlink announced that in the the API for the routers, the gRPC API, they are taking away the location stuff and they're right too. So, the interesting thing is you can go see the uh the latency that they report and it's always lower than what Speedify reports. Uh it was in the 20s, now it's 38, but Speedify seeing 47 milliseconds of latency.

[00:00:20]>> Look how steady it is compared to a cellular device.

[00:00:22]>> Yeah, it's steady. That's right.

[00:00:24]Starlink's latency is uh pretty good.

[00:00:26]It's in the 20s. And the reason is that they are just pinging through Speedify to like the first router at the base station. It's not all the way to the internet. You'll never get a ping as low as what they show you. SpaceX, Starlink, they now have more than 10,000 satellites.

[00:00:44]>> That's insane to even think about.

[00:00:45]>> They have twice as many satellites as everyone else put together. So latency is super low there. But when you go to geocynchronous orbit, you only need three satellites to cover the whole world. But the latency is terrible.

[00:00:55]where we typically see 800 850 millisecond latency. The low earth orbit ones like Starlink actually they're moving from 550 km up above the surface down to just 480 clips another half second off the latency and it makes the beams tighter. The number of people sharing each satellite with you goes down.

[00:01:13]>> Yes, it's great.

[00:01:13]>> The way location works, everyone in these satellite dishes has a super accurate GPS antenna and by default if somebody like us connects to it, it won't tell us your location. But you can go to Starlink and say, "Turn on GPS location on my router." And if you did that, then computers on your local network could ask for your GPS location.

[00:01:30]Get it? Turns out that is not fine grained enough security. You turn it on so that your Starlink app can show you where you are. And now web pages that your kids open can potentially connect pull your exact location down to a couple meters. Scary stuff. We've never used it. You know, nowhere in here if you look does it show your GPS location.

[00:01:50]I [clears throat] once wrote a P Python program to see if it worked and was, you know, able to pull the exact location of, you know, our dishes on the roof.

[00:01:57]So, Starlink has taken that away, right?

[00:01:59]To take that away and it doesn't affect us at all cuz we never used it cuz it was creepy and we try not to do creepy things here. So, Mike, you want to tell us [clears throat] about the what is this Starlink API that I'm talking about?

[00:02:08]>> Sure. Those of you familiar with, you know, web services, Starlink uses a service called gRPC. Basically, it was RPC, which is remote procedure calls, which is a cheap way to do things online. Um, and then Google kind of took it over. The G kind of stands loosely for Google, but it's kind of recursive in the name. So, every Starlink is running these gRPC servers. And what that is going to do for anybody that wants to use it, it's a really fast option to talk to your router.

[00:02:33]Basically, it's built on protocol buffers. If you guys are familiar with JSON or XML, it's a really, really small version to communicate rather than something bulky like JSON and XML. to use the API out get a little more detail. We had to scour the internet make some calls to the Starlink router itself to kind of see what the schema is. So once we see the schema you kind of decide what do we want what does speedify want to use in its API to talk to the router. So we query the Starlink API we get the schema back that it's on the router and then we kind of craft our own protobuff headers and then in Speedify we use C++. So we have a protobuff compiler that compiles it to C++ we can make those calls back and forth on the network. What's really really cool is that it's built on top of HTTP2 which means it's super fast and when you have this minuscule data in serial data talking over a local network I mean your Starlink is rapid firing so it's really great for real-time stats and that's what speedify is doing here so you could count on the data being fast reliable and defined yeah so all those stats that I showed in Starlink are coming back over that we're asking it to give us the stats and it gives us lots including you know that we've been cut off for using too much data again so it also tells us all the alerts this is a stats. There's something like 15 things that a Starlink can announce went wrong. It can tell you that has a low signal to noise ratio. It can tell you that it's overheating. It can tell you that the Ethernet cable or adapter you're using is not fast enough to keep up with it. So, all of those two we we now capture and will show in Speedify.

[00:03:56]So, you'll get a red banner saying Starling 2 overheating. Uh-oh. Starlink hasn't, as far as I know, really said that everyone else can use it.

[00:04:03]>> Not at all. But, you know, official partners are using it. There's nothing trying to stop us. up. They actually specifically announced like, "Whoa, we are taking away the location stuff and like, yeah, you should take away location stuff." Right now, Starling kind of stands alone and I don't expect it to last. LEO is coming. They said they were launching in July, but they are far short of where they meant to be with satellites. So, I don't know if they're launching, if they're not launching. They really got tangled up.

[00:04:30]The Blue Origin mishap or Blue Origin failed to get that satellite into the right orbit. The FAA has grounded the Blue Origin new Glenn rocket until the the issue is fully explained, fully fixed to the FAA's approval. This happened to Blue Origin once before.

[00:04:47]They got it done in 2 and 1/2 months.

[00:04:48]They got the FAA convinced they'd found and fixed the problem, whatever that problem was. Their goal was 1,600 satellites by the end of July. Wow. I think they're at 260 satellites. Leo says they're going to support 1 GB speeds. I saw in person once one of the dishes. It is the size of two Starlink dishes side by side. Let's look at Speedify 16.6, the latest version of Speedfi. So, we are connected to a Starlink, which we beat to death. We used so much data on this thing. We are now rate limited. Oops. And we dismissed the alert about it. But that's why backup, the automatic priority, which decides how much to use in given internet connection, has switched it to backup because Speedify has detected that this Starlink is uh rate limiting us. So when you scroll down you get Starlink stats and if you click expand you'll see these are all of the stats that Starlink makes available to us with their API. So these highle ones how much download upload latency uptime you know how long has it been since it last rebooted how much is obstructed. It shows you the exact angle it's tilted which way Starlink says it should be tilted. It says what kind of plan you're on. Whether or not you're roaming here you can see the overage limits. Ah out of data. That's Starlink telling us you are out of data. You are being slowed down for using it too much.

[00:06:03]>> So the thing is like you one may say but aren't all these features in the Starlink app already.

[00:06:09]>> Yes, sort of. The Starlink app can only connect to one Starlink. If you have two Starlinks, it's always going to connect to one of them. It cannot connect to the other. There's no way to tell it which one to connect to. They try to grab the same IP address. You can't put two Starlinks on the same network unless you put Speedify on it. So Speedify will list however many Starlinks you have.

[00:06:28]You can monitor, manage, and control all of them at once. And then there's the hardware section, and then you get to start dish alignment. So, this is a neat little thing we have built to help you align your dish. There's two dots here.

[00:06:40]One, the direction that Starlink says your dish should be pointed, and the other one is the way my dish is pointed.

[00:06:45]And they're basically on top of each other, so alignment looks good. But if they were off, this wizard would guide you through. Stop pointing south, you should be pointing north. You know, you should turn it 75° or whatever. And if you're doing this on a ladder, there's a audio tracking feature where it makes little ping noises so you can tell as you get closer and closer the little sonar sounds. There's a lot more Starlink stuff coming. I think there's going to be another release something like this week, maybe beginning next week with more cool stuff. I think there's going to be another release after that at which point Beify will have everything everything that Starlink exposes properly used. You will discover the second that Amazon Leo is out that I will be completely obsessed with Amazon Leo. Yes.

[00:07:24]>> Don't imagine that this is me being some kind of fanboy. As soon as I can get my hands on the Leo stuff, I am going to be living and breathing Leo for, you know, 3 months and then we'll have old Leo stuff supported. It's going to be awesome. In conclusion, I want you to subscribe for more tech talks like this.

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