[Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[David P. Reed]

Hi Dave - 
 
Well, you may not be happy with my response, but I think my views below are likely to play out in some form that is pretty predictable. I think it will be a bad result in Space. (The idea of Space being "free" is very unlikely to occur, just as unlikely as the current Internet was to happen in 1975.)
 

> Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 12:31:35 -0700
> From: Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> To: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at deepplum.com>
> Cc: starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"
> Message-ID:
> <CAA93jw4bZBDf3jJ-dboBbf9PS2TsYYJhW+myWHNUdOt7CJqWTw at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
> Dear David:
> 
> Would it cheer you up any to learn, that 15+ years after the debate
> over UWB ended, that it's finally seeing FAR more
> major uptake and reasonable standardization, and actual working chips?
>
[DPR} not that much cheered up, actually. While that disaster around UWB got me interested in how the politics worked, that isn't what depressed me. I won't be cheered up until the FCC stops treating the spectrum like property and started basing its decisions on achieving fully scalable wireless networking. UWB doesn't address that issue. It's unscalable for the same reasons - the misunderstanding of information theory and physics of propagation that remains endemic in the whole framework of spectrum "property rights". 

> It did me. I was pretty scarred by that mess also, and what was it?
> the 272 notches the FCC demanded be cut out of it, which swamped
> circuit design capabilities at the time... but not as bad as you.
> 
> I didn't know until recently that it had hit iphones in 2019. and was
> part of the airtags, nor that the baseline latency on the things was
> 50us, with admittedly only a 1000 bit payload - Still crippled as to
> distance, and total bandwidth to under 10mbits, but, power usage is
> *amazing*.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
> 
> The SPARK chips in particular have a nice looking devkit.
> 
> Anyway... just as the swamp of ipx and non-interoperable email systems
> finally died...
> 
> You can't in the end, keep a good idea down. Maybe on average it takes
> 25 years to settle on saner things.
 
It's taken over 50, and counting, for the FCC to acknowledge that co-channel signalling actually works, because in digital systems we have channel coding since Shannon first wrote about information theory. And that is only the beginning of what is wrong with the "property" model, which assumes all wireless signals require a perfectly clear channel.
 
The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that Cooperative signalling protocols can create huge capacity gains, or that it's possible that multiple co-channel signals can actually create channel capacity that grows with the number of antennas (as long as modest cooperation is ensured).
 
The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that the Internet is a unifying "service" that obviates almost all of the concepts of "allocating spectrum" to "services". (they still treat Broadcast services separately from telephony, and telephony separately from Land Mobile, etc.) So, for example, Emergency Communications is regulated as if the Internet cannot be utilized, as just one example. In other words, to a thoughtful communications engineer, the FCC is a joke.
 
Mostly this is due to two factors. 1. Property rights creates opportunity for scarcity based monopoly to be granted by the government to its friends. 2. The folks who have demonstrated these technologies (using information theory and propagation physics and internetworking of wireless nets) are paid entirely by the would be monopolists (what used to be called "The Phone Company", the evil conspiracy of The President's Analyst, which you might have seen). The FCC is a captured regulator. And its role, sanctified by Congress is to create siloed monopolies. Not for the public good, but for the control of communications and enrichment of the controllers.

> 
> ... We have centuries to sort the solar system's internet out, and the more
> we can do to convince the next generation as to the right principles
> to apply to it, the better.
 
I don't think the World Radio Conference (which manages all RF services in the world, including the US), even has thought about Space, but to be honest, what they want is to control all Space communications on behalf of all governments, most of which derive substantial revenue by blocking innovative new ideas.
 
I am sad that is true, but it is almost certainly gonna happen. The DoD will play the same role it did with radio in the beginning of the 20th century, buying up all the patents, blocking any new entrants, and eventually creating RCA, a monopoly on all radio technology. That will almost certainly happen to the Solar System's communications (and property rights on messages from the earth to asteroids will be *owned* by some company, backed by the coercive power of the governments colonizing space).'

> 
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