Remote Latency problems

Im on a cruise ship now trying to succeed with Smartlink. Like on another post, the warerfall freezes on and off quickly and sometimes stops for a few seconds.

Video works, because it is buffered and you don't care if it is 30 seconds late our you loose 20% of the video frames because the eye/brain fills that in. SSB data can't be buffered because it is time sensitive. Imagine if you were up to 30 seconds behind. It all looks good to you, but not usable. Even some remote SDR Receivers run pretty buffered if their upload is questionable.

The same is true on your remote desktop. You are only sending the changes in the BIT map on your desktop, not the entire Desktop Frame.

Jitter deserves a closer look since it's really the core issue for FlexRadio's SmartLink audio in questionable ISP situations.

Jitter is the variation in packet arrival time, not the delay itself. A steady 300ms of latency is imperceptible to a real time audio stream because everything shows up at a predictable interval and the jitter buffer smooths it out. But audio needs a continuous, evenly spaced stream of packets to feed the decoder. When arrival times swing around, whatever buffer is smoothing that stream either runs dry (causing a dropout or freeze) or overflows (forcing discarded packets).

That is precisely why a satellite link like Starlink is a rough environment for it. Starlink doesn't behave like a stable pipe. It hands off between satellites every few minutes, contends for bandwidth with every other user in the cell, and the routing path through the ground station can shift. Each of those introduces small, irregular timing hiccups. None of them show up as high latency in a ping test, since average round trip time can look fine, but they show up as variance between individual packets, which is exactly what jitter measures and what a speed test doesn't.

Add Deep Packet Inspection (done in all public ISP to prevent huge streaming) driven traffic shaping on top of that and the effect compounds. If the ISP is deprioritizing or throttling what it detects as streaming traffic, it likely is not doing so smoothly. It is probably applying shaping in bursts, which introduces exactly the kind of irregular delay pattern that produces jitter.

You can test your Jitter and see what it looks like: https://jitter.is/

This is what a stable terrestrial connection looks like. It will be interesting to see what you are seeing.