[Starlink] starlink business peering

[Dave Taht]

Starlink has described how to peer with them extensively now. It is
still kind of confusing to me - say I had fios to the business, and a
AS that met their requirements, I could also somehow dual home that AS
to my starlink terminal, and it would be a business class service
required?

https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/peering-with-starlink


On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 1:21 AM David Lang via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>
> > All good points ... see below.
> >
> > On 27/02/2024 2:13 pm, David Lang wrote:
> >> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
> >>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
> >>
> >>>> There are large areas with poor or non-existant cell coverage.
> >>>>
> >>>> Outside the US, scaling of Starlink can happen just by providing coverage
> >>>> to locations that don't yet have coverage with no additional satellites.
> >>> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or
> >>> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
> >>
> >> per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those areas
> >> are ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even to cell
> >> towers or wireless ISP towers)
> > The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the
> > scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.
>
> I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed doesn't
> matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options matters
> more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other options (and
> I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly densely
> populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically test it
> and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.
>
> >>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over
> >>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
> >>
> >> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible
> >> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be
> >> competitive to fibre
> >>
> >> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
> > Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how many
> > of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?
>
> what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B under-connected?
>
> (and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up connection,
> what is the definition of 'under-connected'?, see the revoking of the grant to
> SpaceX for providing such service after they changed the definition of minimum
> acceptable connectivity and then proactively declared that Starlink will not
> meet it several years out)
>
> >>> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a
> >>> factor of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce
> >>> footprint to a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about
> >>> antenna sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in
> >>> terms of capacity as long as our user density is the same. It also buys us
> >>> an extra 6 dB in received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per
> >>> symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3
> >>> bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in gain
> >>> or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns into a game of diminishing
> >>> margins pretty quickly, too.
> >>
> >> add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and you
> >> can get a noticable multiple as well
> > Not in terms of capacity - but in terms of a better distribution of it.
> > Already happening - most places can now "see" dozens of Starlink satellites
> > above the horizon.
>
> but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell
> is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
>
> >>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller
> >>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to
> >>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had
> >>> with Dishy.
> >>
> >> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an
> >> emergancy contact capability
> >
> > Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much more
> > than just an emergency contact capability:
> >
> > https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/
> >
> > (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're going to
> > get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)
>
> yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been pretty vocal
> that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available
> bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should always work,
> voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will happen,
> but will be slow due to the sharing.
>
> >>> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so
> >>> customers to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that,
> >>> we need a factor of 1000.
> >>
> >> without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, it's
> >> going to be really hard to get concrete arguments.
> >>
> >> Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have now, and
> >> the full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth of the V1s
> >> (don't know how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a factor of 100x
> >> there.
> >
> > It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just adding
> > transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, then even if
> > the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate into as
> > much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in terms of
> > spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't make any
> > more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting antenna
> > side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are running close
> > to spectral capacity in some areas.
>
> I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites (~45k
> satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan to be able
> to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am speculating
> about this.
>
> > Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is somewhat
> > similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, we need
> > that factor of 1000.
>
> I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a luxury, not a
> lifeline. I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than
> the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and awareness of
> Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.
>
> I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, including in
> built-up areas.
>
> >> Is another 10x in the under-served areas being in less dense areas really
> >> that hard to believe?
> >>
> >> And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't have
> >> to serve everyone.
> > So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink & Co
> > over today?
>
> not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more
> optomistic about it than you are.
>
> >>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you
> >>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client.
> >>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over
> >>> again through the same pipe, too.
> >>
> >> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share
> >> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead
> >> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement
> >> caches.
> >
> > Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still focuses
> > on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.
>
> SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
> high-performance community gateways.
>
> I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
>
> I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one
> uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy
> kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of
> the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and
> don't forget the need for power for the system)
>
> David Lang_______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink



-- 
https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/2024_predictions/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos