[Starlink] congestion control info off the datapath

[Ulrich Speidel]

I'm Ulrich and I'm at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Broader 
interest is in novel technologies for getting (better or any at all) 
Internet to the underserved of this world. In our backyard that means - 
mostly but not only tropical - Pacific Islands with too few folks on 
them to make a business case for a submarine fibre connection. I've so 
far mostly concentrated on narrowband GEO and MEO pipes to small island 
ISPs or ISP-like entities, and you've linked to our home page 
(https://sde.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/ 
<https://sde.blogs.auckland.ac.nz>) 
the other day - much appreciated.

Interest in Starlink: It's one of the developments that might help in 
this effort, although the current orbital inclinations (53 degrees) 
still leave large gaps around the tropical regions. No surprise all 
those gushing beta user reports come from people north / south of 40 
degrees latitude, where satellite density is highest. For the tropical 
Pacific, remoteness will be another showstopper while Starlink uses 
standard bent pipe links - you really need to be within a couple of 
hundred miles of a gateway teleport of this to work. Many islands we 
worry about are many hundreds of miles from the next connected piece of 
land, let alone a Starlink teleport. So once inter-satellite routing 
will be happening (how? when? where?), we may be debating bufferbloat 
all over again. I'm also intrigued how the global Starlink system 
capacity (rumoured to be 23.6 Tb/s for the commercial start) will 
suffice to service the billions of underconnected in the world when much 
of that capacity will be over water at any time (where it's not needed). 
I'm thinking here in particular that this number is awfully close to the 
current connected capacity between Australia/NZ and North America, and 
there's only around 25 million of us here who, unlike Starlink 
customers, have CDN server farms between ourselves and our international 
links. So I have heaps of questions, which have recently appeared in an 
APNIC blog:

https://blog.apnic.net/2021/05/20/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-leo-satellites-part-1-the-basics/ 


On 25/07/2021 5:02 am, Dave Taht wrote:
>
> Please? newer folk here, please briefly introduce yourselves and your
> interests in starlink's stuff?
> I very much approve of lurkers - even aliases! for those that cannot
> talk due to various NDAs, etc, but...
-- 

****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282

The University of Auckland
ulrich at cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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