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

[Alexandre Petrescu]

Le 10/11/2023 à 14:44, David Lang a écrit :
> On Fri, 10 Nov 2023, Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> Yet there are additional technical reasons as to why extending the
>>  WiFi to others is inconvenient.  For both IPv4 and IPv6 the other
>>  users would be situated behind NATs, multiple levels of them.  It
>>  would break certain apps.
> 
> given how many users live behing multiple layers of NAT now, I think
>  there are fewer apps that would break than you think (and in terms
> of overall traffic, it's a very small percentage)
> 
> I'm not a fan of wifi mesh, it can work in some conditions, but it 
> breaks down quickly under load (aittime utilization, be it number of
>  nodes, number of users, area covered, or bandwidth used). But
> setting up a structured distribution to a number of APs can scale
> well (I run the wireless network at the Scale conference and use
> simple APs (most over a decade old now) running openWRT to support
>> 3500 geeks over a 100,000 sq ft facility)
> 
>> 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.
> 
> that's still a guest mode on a bunch of separate uplink networks, not
> the same as sharing one uplink network with a wide group of people.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I'm not understanding what you think Starlink is prohibiting here.

Original poster (Dave, not me) provided this text: "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.""

If that text is true, I tend to agree with the interpretation that that
text prohibits sharing the wifi.

It says 'personal, family, household'.  That certainly means to be: not
my visitors, not my neighbors.

In the past it was the case like that with non-space home ISPs.  There
were requests to modify that, business to open.  The response was the
appearance of business that shared the wifi (independent wifi sharing
boxes, free for end users), independent of the ISPs.  It led into the
development of the concept of sharing WiFi among users of same ISP, and
agreements between ISPs.  The same could happen now with Starlink.

However, and I will post separately, there are so many unknowns and so
much noise about Starlink in general, changing all the time, that it is
hard to make a definitive oppinion.  Basically one does not know what is
real until one tries it, and I have not tried it (I am not a starlink
user but considering it).

Alex

> 
> each dish in an area imposes noticable overhead, beyond simply the 
> bandwidth the user consumes, so it's better for the starlink system 
> to have fewer dishes that distribute to the same number of users, 
> with the same usage patterns.
> 
>>> resale is prohibited.
> 
> resale is prohibited, but cost sharing is not, and I don't even think
> that resale of the service to the community would be prohibited, just
> resale of the equipment, or setting yourself up as a distributer of
> starlink service and equipment.
> 
> David Lang