[Starlink] APNIC56 last week

[Ulrich Speidel]

FWIW, I gave a talk about Starlink - insights from a year in - at last 
week's APNIC56 conference in Kyoto:

https://conference.apnic.net/56/program/program/#/day/6/technical-2/

Also well worth looking at is Geoff Huston's excellent piece on the 
foreseeable demise of TCP in favour of QUIC in the same session. One of 
Geoff's main arguments is that the Internet is becoming local, i.e., 
most traffic goes between a CDN server and you, and most data is 
becoming proprietary to the application owner, meaning it suits the 
Googles and Facebooks of this world very well not to be using TCP for 
its transport, but rather pull the transport specifics into the 
application layer where the have full control.

Food for thought, especially since LEO networks are a particularly bad 
place to put local content caches, since the concept of what's "local" 
in a LEO network changes constantly, at around 20,000 miles an hour or 
so. Spoke to a Rwandan colleague who installs Starlink there and sees 
all traffic to anywhere go via the US with RTTs of nearly 2 seconds, 
even if the Rwandan user is trying to access a Rwandan service.

About to hop onto a plane (ZK-NZJ) tonight with free WiFi (Ka band GEO) 
enroute to Auckland in the hope of getting a better experience than last 
time when the system seemed to run out of IP addresses on its DHCP.

-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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