[Starlink] Starlink Digest, Vol 17, Issue 22

[David Fernández]

"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."

A LEO SATCOM network such as Starlink uses unicast and is not taking
advantage of the inherent broadcasting capabilities of SATCOM. Each
SATCOM user can be receiving its separate multimedia stream for the
same data from server on ground, through the satellites. From a
bandwidth and routing perspective, this approach is inefficient. In a
3GPP-based network, evolved multimedia broadcast and multicast service
(eMBMS) can provide capabilities for delivering contents to multiple
users simultaneously, but there are challenges for its deployment.
Another alternative can be to use the Information-Centric Networking
(ICN) paradigm, with its inherents capabilities for network-layer
multicast, anchorless mobility, security and optimized data delivery,
using local caching at the edge.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9269

> Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2022 10:50:35 +1200
> From: Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz>
> To: starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink "beam spread"
> Message-ID: <15982a40-2b34-7ed1-bfa3-bced03fc3839 at auckland.ac.nz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
> 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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>
> --
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************