[Starlink] [NNagain] one dish per household is silly.

[Dave Taht]

As today is the 25th anniversary of my merry geekhouse's building and
documenting one of the first long distance wifi connections in the USA
(nov 10th 1998) ( a pre-blog post here:
http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html that I wrote while recovering
from a cold caught by climbing on my roof and fixing my antenna in the
rain, and then sitting there for an hour, thinking about what we had
done - a recap from 2010 here:
http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html
 )

I am in a reflective mood, reading over stuff I blogged
(the-edge.blogspot.net) in 2002-2004 and trying to figure out what
went right and what went wrong. I have all those emails from 1998-2002
somewhere...

On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 8:17 AM Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> When I saw the subject line I thought the proposal was to add several
> dishes per household, but no.

There is a natural limit to the number of dishes per cell. The amount
of bandwidth is enormous if you discount the potential impact of
netflix-like traffic, and even then netflix "DASH" traffic as well as
youtube, will scale down to 1.5Mbits/sec or less.

> Le 10/11/2023 à 13:55, Dave Taht via Starlink a écrit :
> > On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 7:33 AM Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Nov 10, 2023, at 12:44, Dave Taht via Nnagain
> >>> <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote: Steve song's analysis
> >>> here:
> >>> https://manypossibilities.net/2023/11/starlink-and-inequality/
> [...]
>
> > There is no prohibition against sharing. The closest that document
> > comes to it is: "The Standard Service Plan is designed for personal,
> >  family, or household use."
>
> And, the specs of Starlink WiFi Router say "Mesh - Compatible with up to
> 3 Starlink Mesh nodes".  Why 3 and not 4, one might wonder.

The sad thing about most of the wifi meshes is that they are not
interoperable between vendors. "EasyMesh", from the wifi alliance, was
supposed to fix this, but it is pretty lame. 802.11s supposedly can go
to 32 mesh nodes. I do not know what the limit actually is on eero (it
is partially 802.11s). I worked pretty hard on mesh technologies (see
OLPC), as well as more advanced mesh types (built around wifi adhoc
mode) for much larger distributed wifi networks (5-10k nodes with the
babel protocol), nearly all the big outdoor meshy network makers have
their own routing protocol to manage failover and optimization.

In all cases, bufferbloat is what, in part, made wifi meshes scale
badly, and eeros' adoption of fq_codel is in part what made their
product an early success when so many others (including olpc) had
failed.

The most interoperable L2 wifi mesh "standard" is the batman protocol, IMHO.

> Yet there are additional technical reasons as to why extending the WiFi
> to others is inconvenient.

The starlink gen2 router did not have ethernet ports. I tossed it, and
plugged something better in. Then I plugged it back in to test some
stuff I am not officially supposed to know or talk about. I keep
hoping for a report from someone on the starlink list about the
attributes of the gen3 router. In terms of spreading internet around
more physically, ethernet to fiber converters are cheap, and you can
go 1000s of meters with cheap SFPs nowadays.

> For both IPv4 and IPv6 the other users would
> be situated behind NATs, multiple levels of them.  It would break
> certain apps.

Very few popular apps break nowadays because of multiple layers of
NAT. End user apps that don't work with NAT have largely vanished.
Even "homeservers" proxy through the cloud. It is not a desirable end
to the end to end internet, but it is what it is.

In starlink's case, you can request a real IPv4 address from the app
at no extra charge. This is kind of becoming a default in many places,
as it is still very helpful to have a real ip for vpns, as one
example. Elsewhere, you can still rent ip addresses from many ISPS, I
think a block of 5 was running about 25/month.

As for IPv6 support, I have seen varying degrees of support for it
from starlink around the world, but do not know if anything more than
a /64 can be requested.  (?) 40% of my personal starlink traffic is
ipv6, with the notable exceptions of fosstodon, github...

I see /60 and /56 requests succeeding for comcast. When we designed
ipv6, we imagined a static /48 assigned per household.

To get around the ipv6/64 limitation (one subnet) - many folk just
bridge it, or more advanced meshy folk (babel, oslr, batman) just do
p2p routes. I had L3 mobility working on wifi adhoc mode as early as,
oh, 2004? Always puzzled as to why it has been so hard to keep wifi's
original adhoc mode alive. Bridging wifi really hurts the network on
multicast traffic, still, to this day. I am happy that the biggest
multicast user (mdns) on local networks has a unicast upgrade path for
protocols now.

> This kind of WiFi sharing was tried and with some degree of success to
> ground multi-ISP settings.  My home ISP WiFi allows other users having
> same ISP at their home.  Some agreements exist between some ISPs to
> expand that domain of allowance.

There is quite a big push for harmonizing single signon captive portal
technology in the wifi world. Boingo, eduroam, telecom infrastructure
project, many others are in it.

> Here we talk about only one ISP.  Starlink might want, as a first step,
> to allow other users that have Starlink at their home.  When more space
> ISPs like this will appear, maybe some agreements might happen.

What I had wanted was for the starlink business service to allow
BYO-IP and BGP as a fallback for wired services. I hope that appears
(if it hasn't), soon.

> Alex
>
>
> >
> > resale is prohibited.
> >
> >>> I know of refuge centers in the ukraine serving hundreds of
> >>> people as one example.
> >>
> >> And if Musk weren’t cutting Starlink connectivity for Ukrainian
> >> defensive uses, those refugee centers wouldn’t have so many people
> >> in them.  And, more to the point, Ukrainian graveyards wouldn’t
> >> have so many people in them.
> >>
> >
> > Remarkably, the terms of service do include this:
> >
> > "However, Starlink is not designed or intended for use with or in
> > offensive or defensive weaponry or other comparable end-uses. Custom
> >  modifications of the Starlink Kits or Services for military end-uses
> >  or military end-users may transform the items into products
> > controlled under U.S. export control laws, specifically the
> > International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (22 C.F.R. §§
> > 120-130) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) (15 C.F.R.
> > §§ 730-774) requiring authorizations from the United States
> > government for the export, support, or use outside the United States.
> > Starlink aftersales support to customers is limited exclusively to
> > standard commercial service support. At its sole discretion, Starlink
> > may refuse to provide technical support to any modified Starlink
> > products and is grounds for termination of this Agreement."
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos