[Starlink] Starlink Digest, Vol 12, Issue 6

[David Lang]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2022, Ben Greear wrote:

> 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.

I'm not saying new apps need to be written, I'm saying that the apps that can 
work in such an environment need to be identified. How many of those 'free' 
commecial offerings will work without talking to their central servers? find 
ones that can be configured to talk to local servers running on 'low end' 
equipment

I'm not looking for something kluged together that only an expert can maintain, 
I'm looking for something put together by experts so that non-experts can deploy 
it onto common, cheap hardware. I've seen too many 'disaster relief kits' that 
get put together that use super hardened (and rare) hardware that's abandoned by 
the vendor soon afte it ships. Send something that can be used people with the 
phones they aready have in their pockets, not something that requied $5-10k 
custom tablets (a real example I saw).

APs may need to get shipped with a dishy as reflashing them is a fairly expert 
move, but there should be little need to ship endpoints.

focus on the instructions, picking apps to use, and providing local servers to 
use.

David Lang