[Starlink] APNIC56 last week

[Alexandre Petrescu]

Le 19/09/2023 à 06:39, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink a écrit :
> 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/


Thanks for the presentation.

I would like to ask what do you mean by "Method #2: "space lasers""and 
"Not all Starlink satellites have
lasers" on slide 5?

It seems to be saying there is inter-satellite communications. The need 
of that seems to stem from the lack of ground 'teleport' that is 
necessary for DISHY-SAT-Internet communications, so a SAT-to-SAT 
communication is apparently used with lasers.  I can agree with the need.

What standard is used for these lasers?

Is this ISL communicaiton within the starlink constellation a 
supposition or a sure thing?

Other presentations of starlink mentioned on this list dont talk about 
this lasers between sats (dont show  lasers on the sats), but kepler 
talks about optical links, and also there is talk about ISOC LEO 
Internet about such 'lasers from space'.

(I must say that I thought previously that there were only 2 or 3 ground 
teleports overall in EU and USA, but I see now there is a teleport in NZ 
too).

(for price comparison: it is said 100USD monthly, but in France right  
now the monthly subscription is at around 40 Euros;  this competes very 
advantageously to other satcoms ISPs for rural areas non-covered by 5G; 
the cellular monthly subscriptions are still much more advantageous, 
where there is 5G, of course).

Alex

>
> 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.
>