[Starlink] Starlink tidbits from NANOG

[Darrell Budic]

> On Nov 4, 2021, at 7:34 PM, Ulrich Speidel <ulrich at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for that Darrell - that's really interesting! A few comments on that front:
> 
> On 5/11/2021 4:26 am, Darrell Budic wrote:
>> I was at NANOG in Minneapolis, and got a chance to ask a couple question of a Starlink Network Engineer who’s attending. I was already talking to him about Starlink’s network efforts (see below) but it was nice to meet in person. Don’t quote me on any of this, but here’s a few tidbits this list may appreciate:
>> 
>> - Starlink is expanding their own network operations, and is connecting to more IXPs. They were already on SIX in Seattle, have connected to DECIX NY, and are in the process of connecting to ChIX in Chicago. As I run ChIX, I had a good excuse to talk to them about other things. :) IXPs and their own networks are in the works for Europe and other areas as well.
> Makes sense.
>> - They have been obtaining more v4 addresses, but I don’t know if they have enough to not do CGNAT. I don't think they do yet, but it seems like it may be a long term target.
>> - v6 is deliberately not fully functional, but they know some of use are using it and it will eventually be fully activated. May be waiting on the regional connectivity, so will be intersting to see if changes for some areas and not others as they roll it out.
> 
> So I guess we need to distinguish between:
> 
> - IPv4 addresses for any CGNAT they might run
> - IPv4 addresses as static addresses for (some of?) their customers
> - IPv6 addresses as customer addresses
> - IPv6 addresses to support geographic routing as discussed in earlier posts (subnet maps to cell / satellite)
> 
> There are quite a number of feasible configurations in this. E.g., they could be running a CGNAT setup with a v4 pool on the Internet side, use v6 to tunnel route from there to the satellite the end customer connects to, and then map that customer back to a (private) IPv4 address in a NAT on the satellite. One aspect that hasn't really been mentioned much here is that of PDU size on the link between end customer and satellite. Keeping Dishy and its successors small and cheap creates an incentive to operate at marginal SNR, and this favours smaller PDUs over larger ones as the probability of PDU checksum errors increases with PDU size. But having lots of small PDUs means having lots of headers, and as IPv4 addresses are leaner than IPv6 ones, this saves bandwidth here. Probably not a biggie though.

“v6 deliberately non functional” as in they havn’t enabled radvd, not that they’ve broken it, btw. I’m thinking they’ll move to enable v6 fully, and continue to CGNAT the v4 for non-commercial customers. If they can enable routing or tunnels for commercial customers, the customers could likely bring their own v4 ranges. Effectively what I’m doing right now with some simple tunnels...

>> - New ground stations with more capacity are coming (and will be upgrades). 
> Any word on where? At the moment, most of the world can see Starlink satellites, but most Starlink satellites can't see a ground station.

I got the impression it will be new stations to increase density, especially at lower latitudes, but also would be ongoing upgrades for existing POPs to allow the new satellites to take full advantage of their upgrades as well.

>> They are using waves back to regional DCs now, but will be moving to dark fiber over the next year or two
> If that means "radio" waves, then this goes a long way to explaining why there's already limited capacity even near the US-Canada border.
>> - the new satellites have more than 2 lasers, and there is enough capacity on them to do routing. no details on how or what protocols, alas
> Any word on when we can expect to see routing in action?

Sounded like they expected to start testing after another launch or two (three?) of the upgraded sats, so 4 months maybe? Doesn’t seem like a set schedule as they will like test once they have enough capacity, then move to enable as they go.

>> - new birds also have 2-3x more ku bandwidth than first gen
> Hm. Sounds cool, but with 3 billion or so underserved on the planet & typical annual growth rates, that's still just a drop in the bucket.
>> - new dishes are in the works, v4 coming with lower power use, more capacity, not round any more
> Trayee? Squary? Just joking ;-)

Haha, Rectangly apparently. More in line with the size of their phased array antennas and also to lower cost. I imagine it will look a lot like some of the existing IPTV panel receivers.

>> - larger dishes coming for commercial apps
> That's good news, as this will allow Starlink to be used in places where direct-to-site crashes into regulatory hurdles. If we can get the big CDN providers to come up with small (virtual?) appliances that can be put at the remote end of such links by local ISPs, then that'll also help to preserve space segment capacity.

Sounds like they have some regional “super pops” where they can locate todays standard CDN cache services, but they want to try and peer as much as possible for it, both public and private. But emphasis on public up front, especially as they are still trying to get a good handle on the kind of traffic people are pushing over them.

> 
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