[Starlink] Jamaican Starlink Outages and a hint of shared infrastructure

[Ulrich Speidel]

This is actually a wider problem and it's not just a Starlink one. In 
grad school, we teach students what a wonderful thing this Internet is, 
and how it abounds with algorithms that find the shortest path and make 
life wonderful. In practice, most people who "buy Internet" don't look 
much past where their immediate physical connection terminates and what 
might be lurking upstream. I had dinner with the CEO of a REN a few 
years ago who complained bitterly that some university managers didn't 
understand that if they made them an offer to build a connection for 
them, it meant that they could get a dedicated fibre pair all the way to 
the other side of the world if they needed it. And of course their 
offering was a bit dearer than that of the local retail ISP who was also 
offering "X Gb/s" - but of course only going as far as their own 
infrastructure. From where the university traffic would have been 
travelling cattle class.

This can also lead to weird effects globally. For example, much of the 
traffic between Japan and New Zealand *could* in principle trundle down 
to Guam and from there to Sydney and then to Auckland. Which would be 
kind of shortest path. And occasionally it does. But just as often, you 
see it crossing the Pacific to the US West Coast (or from Guam to 
Hawaii) and from there back to New Zealand. Why? Good question. Was it 
because US backhaul carriers were cheaper for a while with the US dollar 
being soft and the Australian / NZ currencies surging in comparison? 
Were there government incentives for carriers to let traffic run through 
US territory for intelligence access (if so, the NSA would have to fear 
a strong dollar I guess)?

With Starlink, keeping traffic out of space might seem a bit weird given 
their 100 Gb/s lasers, but yes it does mean downlinking to 
infrastructure that may path-share with with the infrastructure you're 
seeking to back up. But lasering your traffic around means adding 
latency - the path may zig-zag badly or may even overshoot the target. 
Plus the latency won't be stable. So keeping traffic out of space isn't 
such a bad idea after all perhaps. Then again, Jamaica's fibre 
connectivity is by and large not great circle path either...

On 25/06/2024 2:42 am, J Pan via Starlink wrote:
> can you give the reference to the complaint so we can dive into it a
> bit? once the user packet reaches the satellite, it needs to get to
> the ground (sooner than later according to starlink's current
> practice), which may run into the same fiber to tunnel the packet from
> the landing ground station to the user's home pop. once at the pop,
> most starlink pop's now have at least two neighbor pop's, so
> theoretically, starlink has the capability to route packets to a
> different landing ground station through inter-sat links and another
> pop, if it can arrange so properly
> --
> J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan at UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan
>
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 3:40 AM Inemesit Affia via Starlink
> <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> I don't live in Jamaica but I just saw a user complain his service goes out at the same time his local provider does.
>>
>> The provider is Flow Jamaica and they seem to get service via C&W Caribbean according to another poster.
>>
>> Service going out together likely means there's shared infrastructure. And buying Starlink as backup and having it fail hard without rerouting several times in a row is below expectations.
>>
>> There's another provider in Jamaica. Digicel that seems to have separate infrastructure but that might not be value for money to have alternative connectivity.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Starlink mailing list
>> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

-- 
****************************************************************
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/
****************************************************************