[Starlink] starlink business peering

[David Lang]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Dave Taht wrote:

> Ooops I meant this to be in response to your last point below...
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 2:31 AM Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
>>> 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.
>
> The direct site that they were advertising for 1.2 million or so
> looked compact enough to stuff into a a C130 transport plane and drop
> onto a providers network anywhere, almost overnight, to provide
> 10Gbit(?) service. I did not get the dimensions of it, but...

That is overkill for what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the ability to distribute a single connection (possibly a 
consumer dishy, possibly a surviving landline) to a tent city of a few hundred 
(under a thousand) people. Provide some caching of the service, but also provide 
local communications (email, chat, etc)

The Red Cross and others are setup to provide food and shelter, but local 
communications, announcements, etc (including games and other things to keep 
kids out of trouble) seems like the sort of thing that we should be able to 
setup on the cheap.

>>> 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)
>
> Given that typical usage at ISP peak is about an average of 5Mbit/sec
> per household today, mostly driven by 1/6th the users watching
> netflix, and starlink achieving download speeds regularly of
> 300Mbit...
>
> If movie quality is to be compromised to old fashioned 1.5Mbit 720P,
> 200 households - that can be served by local fiber, wireless bridges,
> even 5G, per terminal, over that 70 miles per cell.

you are again mixing services. The direct-to-phone cell service is 7Mb for a 70 
mile cell.

I don't know the dishy cell size, but I think it's substantially smaller than 70 
miles

> For some of the 2B that have nothing today. Early on I had hoped
> starlink would enable "a village" to have telephony and local internet
> services spread out from there, much like they did in the 90s.
> Additional fiber/wireless bridges can expand that island outside the
> cell.

We have seen community service happen in some places, early on SpaceX showed 
some remote Indian villages getting a single dish for the community

too many people (including too many techies) think that providing wifi service 
out from a point is so trivial that anyone can do it.

> It remains unclear to me how many terminals can be stuffed efficiently
> together.

yep

David Lang