[Starlink] Starlink "beam spread"

[tom at evslin.com]

I think that CDNs will initially collocate some servers at SL uplink/downlink sites and then, eventually, in space where they can be accessed by sat-sat links. This sems a natural extension of business model both for CDNs and for SL and other satellite providers. For starters, there’s no good reason why a DNS query should take four hops. The more content that moves to space, the faster the response time for SL and the less load on its uplink/downlink sites. I speculated more about that evolution here The Internet and The Cloud Are Going into Space <https://blog.tomevslin.com/2021/07/the-internet-and-the-cloud-are-going-into-space.html>  and speculated that there will also be orbital cloud computing centers for many reasons including solar power Computing Clouds in Orbit – A Possible Roadmap <https://blog.tomevslin.com/2021/07/computing-clouds-in-orbit-a-possible-roadmap.html> 

 

 

 

From: Starlink <starlink-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> On Behalf Of Ulrich Speidel via Starlink
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2022 6:51 PM
To: starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink "beam spread"

 

There's another aspect here that is often overlooked when looking purely at the data rate that you can get from your fibre/cable/wifi/satellite, and this is where the data comes from.

A large percentage of Internet content these days comes from content delivery networks (CDNs). These innately work on the assumption that it's the core of the Internet that presents a bottleneck, and that the aggregate bandwidth of all last mile connections is high in comparison. A second assumption is that a large share of the content that gets requested gets requested many times, and many times by users in the same corner(s) of the Internet. The conclusion is that therefore content is best served from a location close to the end user, so as to keep RTTs low and - importantly - keep the load of long distance bottleneck links.

Now it's fairly clear that large numbers of fibres to end users make for the best kind of network between CDN and end user. Local WiFi hotspots with limited range allow frequency re-use, as do ground based cellular networks, so they're OK, too, in that respect.  But anything that needs to project RF energy over a longer distance to get directly to the end user hasn't got nature on its side.

This is, IMHO, Starlink's biggest design flaw at the moment: Going direct to end user site rather providing a bridge to a local ISP may be circumventing the lack of last mile infrastructure in the US, but it also makes incredibly inefficient use of spectrum and satellite resource. If every viral cat video that a thousand Starlink users in Iowa are just dying to see literally has to go to space a thousand times and back again rather than once, you arguably have a problem.

And yes, small neighbourhood networks of the type Mike described could put a significant dent into that problem. But do Starlink actually see Mike supplying 100 people as helpful, or do they see it as 99 customers they can no longer sell a dishy to? Given how they push their services into the market, I suspect it might be the latter. 

On 31/08/2022 10:07 am, Brandon Butterworth via Starlink wrote:

On Tue Aug 30, 2022 at 02:01:49PM -0700, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
> You are absolutly correct that people who can get fiber (and probably even 
> most DSL) are far better using that than Starlink, and 
> last-few-hundred-meters wireless can be better (like DSL, it depends on the 
> exact service available)
...
> People who can get that sort of service are not the target users for 
> Starlink.

But unless Starlink turn them away some will still take the
service despite better options.

I do UK FWA and FTTP in rural areas and know others in the
industry. Some have reported being turned down as the
odd customer is waiting for Starlink (instead of taking a
government GBP4k+ subsidy giving them free fibre/FWA install)

There's no telling some people.

brandon
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-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel
 
School of Computer Science
 
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
 
The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz <mailto:u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz>  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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