There's a Starlink waiting in the sky -- it may not blow your mind though

Elon Musk's Starlink is a project aimed at delivering fast broadband via satellite to rural areas left behind by fiber rollouts.

But research from Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, suggests that its performance is somewhat variable, much faster than fixed broadband in some areas but a lot slower in others.

Using data from Speedtest Intelligence it finds that during the first quarter of this year, median download speeds from Starlink in the US ranged from 40.36 Mbps in Columbia County, Oregon, to 93.09 Mbps in Shasta County, California. In some cases these represent a dramatic improvement over other fixed broadband providers (545.6 percent faster in Tehama County, California) to a disappointment (67.9 percent slower in Clay County, Missouri).

In Canada things are closer, with a low of 53.61 Mbps in Ontario and a high of 80.57 Mbps in Saskatchewan. Download speeds across the country range from 59.6 percent faster than fixed link providers to 40.7 percent slower.

Speed isn't everything though, latency matters too -- especially for tasks like gaming -- and here Starlink struggles. Its latency is up to 486 percent higher in US and 369 percent in Canada. Only in Mariposa County, California was Starlink's latency 17.4 percent lower than that of all other providers.

Ookla states on its blog, "Musk's Starlink experiment is certainly fascinating and we applaud any effort to get better service for rural residents. That said, it's clearly early days for Starlink. We'll be watching to see how performance improves as more satellites are launched and as more users join the service."

You can see more detail on the Speedtest blog.

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