Got this comment on my support call
you may experience varying or slower speeds during times of peak usage.
Our engineering teams are working hard to ensure that congestion remains consistent. Unfortunately, we do not have an estimated time frame on when this will happen.
We will be closing the ticket on the customer support side, as it is a known issue being handled by engineering.
My performance has improved slightly. Over a 2 minute time frame, my download speed varies from 4 -6 mb to 25+ mb, in a repeatable cycle. watching a hd streaming movie causes it to stop for about 5 seconds. not all the time. probably when it's buffer empties out. guess it could be worse and stutter. still annoying and not what i'm paying for.
i'm guessing that as the satellite moves west to east, it sheds some of it's users as they pickup a satellite further west of me. i'm a 100 miles east of san francisco, so the behavior fits, but this is just a guess. the slight improvement might be caused by adding additional satellites to the constellation.
starlink has a new satellite that will support 3 times the users but is larger. it was planned to be launched by starship which has been continually delayed.
in addition, starlink has allowed those who purchase an rv package at a premium - more money to starlink or a best effort package to jump ahead of the line and get a connection, even in a congested area.
starlink should tweak the algorithm so when standard users download drops below 20 mb, they throttle back the rv and best effort users to maintain minimum viable performance.
anyone can log a support issue, the more people that do, the more powerful the argument for starlink to fix the issue. and there are a lot of youtube videos that you can log a comment and complain how poor the performance is. or if you have an option of another isp, cancel starlink.
i think the problem is fixable and something starlink could probably do quickly if their priorities are changed.