[Starlink] Starlink Digest, Vol 12, Issue 6

[Ben Greear]

On 3/4/22 10:14 AM, David Lang wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Mar 2022, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
> 
>> In terms of Starlink - I really think that it's a red herring, at least for now. As I said, if Starlink can't muster anywhere near enough satellite capacity 
>> to serve all of a small town in Montana that's surrounded by gateways close by, then it's not going to be replacing the Internet as we know it in a country 
>> 60% larger in area and 40 x larger in population. At best it might be able to provide some backup in a relatively small number of places.
> 
> It depends on what you set as your requirements. If you are talking about everyone streaming video, you are correct, but if you talk about less bandwidth 
> intensive uses, a little bandwidth goes a long ways.
> 
> There's also FAR more of a difference between nothing and low bandwidth than between low and high bandwidth.
> 
> Telephone audio is an 64Mb stream, without compression, email and text chat are very low bandwidth.
> 
> 20 years ago, you could have an office of 100 employees living on a 1.5Mb Internet connection and have people very happy. A single dishy is 100x this.
> 
> I agree that Starlink is not a full replacement for hard-wired Internet, and it never will be. But the ability to get that much bandwidth into an area that 
> doesn't have wired Internet wihtout requiring special crews to come in and set up the infrastructure (like you would for geostationary dishes) is a huge step 
> forward for disaster relief.
> 
> With capabilities like this now available, we (the tech community) need to look at options to be able to extend this connectivity from a point source across a 
> wider area (ways to do mesh and have it not collapse, understanding channnel allocations, sane directional antenna uses, etc) including how to provide power.
> 
> And also take a careful look at the bandwith that apps are using and find ones that are sane to use. Since (almost) everyone has phones as endpoints now, having 
> the ability to put a voip app on the phones and have them able to call and text chat freely within the connectivity bubble without any need to use the external 
> bandwith, but be able to connect out in a fairly transparent manner (think how long distance calls were something significant 40-50 years ago, but were still 
> using the same equipment and basic process). Can such apps indicate to the user if they are talking to someone really local (say sharing the same wifi), or more 
> remote, so that they can
> 
> How can such apps be made available to the people with phones? (Apple makes it really hard to side-load apps for example), How can the services get bundled 
> (raspverry pi or live CD linux images that provide these services and the app images to download for example). What can be done with OpenWRT builds to make 
> turnkey conversions of APs into bandwidth-efficient mesh nodes. This includes how a bit of wire can go a long way towards making a wifi system work better.

I've been using some sub $100 android phones for testing.  They typically come loaded with crap-ware, but that could
be fixed, and it would be a convenient wifi-only calling phone (and of course it could do a lot more).  If someone
has ability to drop a starlink dish, they could add a small pack of phones to the drop.  That is way more helpful that
some hacked together rpi or other cumbersome kludge, and at similar price point.

As for a 'voip' app, there are plenty of those already, including shiny 'free' commercial offerings.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com