On Thu, 11 Jun 2020, David P. Reed wrote:

> But I doubt that is where they are going. Instead, I suspect they haven't 
> thought about anything other than a packet at a time, with no thought to 
> reporting congestion by drops or ECN.
> 
> And it's super easy to build up seconds of lag on TCP if you don't signal 
> congestion. TCP just keeps opening its window, happy as a clam.

I expect that the bottleneck is going to be in the connection to the Internet.

starlink station to starlink station is one issue

starlink station to Internet is a different issue.

given the download heavy nature of most use, the biggest bottleneck is probably 
going to be at their internet connected uplink stations (which I do not expect 
to be the consumer stations connected to the internet, but something different)

as for the station to station communications, as I understand it, each satellite 
has 4-5 sattelite-satellite connections with one upload/download connection, so 
it's going to depend how many satellite hops the packet has to take, but there's 
a really good chance that there will be excess bandwidth available in the 
sattelite mesh and it will not be the bottleneck.

We will see, but since the answer to satellite-satellite communication being the 
bottleneck is to launch more satellites, this boils down to investment vs 
service quality. Since they are making a big deal about the latency, I expect 
them to work to keep it acceptable.

David Lang