[NNagain] [Starlink] one dish per household is silly.

[Dave Taht]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 8:44 AM David Lang via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 10 Nov 2023, Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink wrote:
>
> >> There is no prohibition against sharing. The closest that document
> >> comes to it is: "The Standard Service Plan is designed for personal,
> >>  family, or household use."
> >
> > And, the specs of Starlink WiFi Router say "Mesh - Compatible with up to
> > 3 Starlink Mesh nodes".  Why 3 and not 4, one might wonder.
> >
> > Yet there are additional technical reasons as to why extending the WiFi
> > to others is inconvenient.  For both IPv4 and IPv6 the other users would
> > be situated behind NATs, multiple levels of them.  It would break
> > certain apps.
>
> given how many users live behing multiple layers of NAT now, I think there are
> fewer apps that would break than you think (and in terms of overall traffic,
> it's a very small percentage)
>
> I'm not a fan of wifi mesh, it can work in some conditions, but it breaks down
> quickly under load (aittime utilization, be it number of nodes, number of users,
> area covered, or bandwidth used). But setting up a structured distribution to a
> number of APs can scale well (I run the wireless network at the Scale conference
> and use simple APs (most over a decade old now) running openWRT to support >3500
> geeks over a 100,000 sq ft facility)

I would really like to see your "vintage" wndr3800s benchmarked
against the latest cisco meraki product, in that kind of environment,
which is also derived from a recent openwrt but for wifi6. The really
bothersome thing about that product is that if you stop paying for the
license, they turn them off.


> > This kind of WiFi sharing was tried and with some degree of success to
> > ground multi-ISP settings.  My home ISP WiFi allows other users having
> > same ISP at their home.  Some agreements exist between some ISPs to
> > expand that domain of allowance.
>
> that's still a guest mode on a bunch of separate uplink networks, not the same
> as sharing one uplink network with a wide group of people.
>
> > Here we talk about only one ISP.  Starlink might want, as a first step,
> > to allow other users that have Starlink at their home.  When more space
> > ISPs like this will appear, maybe some agreements might happen.
>
> I'm not understanding what you think Starlink is prohibiting here.
>
> each dish in an area imposes noticable overhead, beyond simply the bandwidth
> the user consumes, so it's better for the starlink system to have fewer dishes
> that distribute to the same number of users, with the same usage patterns.

Exactly! Most wireless services benefit from some sort of concentrator
and then spreading out the internet via some other method, be it wifi,
or wired. Less (and better) antennas = less interference, more
effective user multiplexing. I am quite grumpy at seeing 160mhz
channels or bigger being the default for 6ghz wifi. 40Mhz gives more
range and less interference.

How to somehow shift the public conversation from "bandwidth" to "more
range and less interference"?


> >> resale is prohibited.
>
> resale is prohibited, but cost sharing is not, and I don't even think that
> resale of the service to the community would be prohibited, just resale of the
> equipment, or setting yourself up as a distributer of starlink service and
> equipment.

Well they have signed up distributors like home depo of the gear. I
have not much clue as to how they handle sales worldwide.

>
> David Lang
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> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink



-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos