[Starlink] FCC Denies Starlink Low-Orbit Bid for Lower Latency (Mark Harris)

Wed Mar 13 23:30:21 EDT 2024

To elon´s comment - for gaming, consistent latency is more important
than low latency. Most game netcode can compensate for a consistent
range of rtts in the 20-100ms range, but not jitter in that range or
beyond. Certainly consistently low latency is great for gaming (vr/ar)
also, and a big benefit is in improving PLT.

Another note inline below:

On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 10:00 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Agency says SpaceX craft could hinder International Space Station
> EXCERPT:
>
> The FCC has once again rejected a Starlink plan to deploy thousands of internet satellites in very low earth orbits (VLEO) ranging from 340 to 360 kilometers. In an order published last week, the FCC wrote: “SpaceX may not deploy any satellites designed for operational altitudes below the International Space Station,” whose orbit can range as low as 370 kilometers.

Simplest answers: Raise the orbit of ISS. Or let it burn. It doesn´t
need to get serviced from Russia anymore.

I have a story about Space Station Freedom[1]´s conversion to become
the ISS, from late 1993, that not a lot of people know. I met an
engineer who had just quit NASA in rage, because in the great
political compromise of the day, after the 7th redesign and scaledown
- that to bring the Russians in, they moved the orbit from being
convenient to Canaveral, to convenient from Baikonur (51.6 degrees),
and changed the name from Freedom to "The ISS".

He was calling himself "Crazy Horse". He was mad because this move "in
partnership" did not save money, but cost (possibly 3x!) more in the
long run, and put extra stresses on the Space Shuttle to get to that
orbit - and yet it was being pitched by the politicians as a cost
saver. It was, perhaps needed, to "save the program" - but the true
costs of the orbit change so far as I know have never been calculated
or written about. The former nasa engineer, "Crazy Horse", was
alternatively manic, and suicidal. He was in really bad shape.

We spent a week together, drinking, talking space stuff, walking the
beach, trading off guitar licks, and sitting in the hot tub at Pigeon
Point Lighthouse on the california coast with a variety of foreign
travelers (mostly girls!), able to clearly see the milky way and our
tattered dreams.

In the end I incorporated part of his story in mine. I´d blocked out
everything about NASA and space in '86, the day I saw Feynman gave his
famous demonstration showing why Challenger blew - not because of the
flaw in the tang, but because lawyers had no respect for the laws of
physics. It was not seeing Feynman´s demonstration that burnt me, but
the politicians positioning themselves for the cameras, oblivious to
the physics.

The real Crazy Horse´s backstory has some analogies worth grokking also.

To this day I do not remember that ex-NASA-engineer´s real name, or if
he lived through his pain or not, or found some other career. Maybe
it´s on the hostel register from that week. The hot tub at Pigeon
Point there fell into the ocean, long ago.

He became Rhysling, in my song, "Rhysling and me" [2], which we wrote
and scribbled down on the register at that hostel. I don´t fully
remember the lyric about him, and would have to go back to look.
Something like "Crazy Horse stood high upon the mountain... 51.6 too
hard to climb, and freedom too hard to redesign".

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom - the change of
orbit is not in this page...

2) https://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003_02_16_the-edge_archive.html

   I have mostly retired the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTPJO-cAAjQ and replaced it with
happier stuff, since 2004, and the spaceshipone launches, but I still
get ´86 flashbacks, on the eve of a new launch. Not so much when
people are not on it, though.

Gosh, tomorrow is going to be grand.

...

> Starlink currently has nearly 6000 satellites orbiting at around 550 kilometers that provide internet access to over 2.5 million customers around the world. But its service is currently slower than most terrestrial fiber networks, with average latencies (the time for data to travel between origin and destination) over 30 milliseconds at best, and double that at peak times.
>
> “If you fill that region with tens of thousands of satellites, it would put an even bigger squeeze on them and really compromise your ability to service the space station.”
>
> —HUGH LEWIS, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON, U.K.
>
>
> “The biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds,” said Elon Musk at a SpaceX event in January. “For the quality of internet experience, this is actually a really big deal. If you play video games like I sometimes do, this is also important, otherwise you lose.”

Well, fixing the jitter counts for more. So long as you don´t bounce
around much more than 60ms most netcode can compensate.

> The easiest way to reduce latency is to simply shorten the distance the data have to travel. So in a February letter, SpaceX pleaded with the FCC to allow its VLEO constellation: “Operating at these lower altitudes will enable SpaceX to provide higher-quality, lower-latency satellite service for consumers, keeping pace with growing demand for real-time applications.” These now include the military use of Starlink for communications in warzones such as Ukraine.
>
> Starlink also argued that its VLEO satellites would have collision probabilities ten times lower than those in higher orbits, and be easier to deorbit at the end of their functional lives.
>
> But the FCC was having none of it. The agency had already deferred VLEO operations when it licensed Starlink operations in December 2022, and used very similar languages in its order last week: “SpaceX must communicate and collaborate with NASA to ensure that deployment and operation of its satellites does not unduly constrain deployment and operation of NASA assets and missions, supports safety of both SpaceX and NASA assets and missions, and preserves long-term sustainable space-based communications services.”
>
> Neither the FCC nor SpaceX replied to requests for comment, but the agency’s reasoning is probably quite simple, according to Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton in the U.K. “We don’t understand enough about what the risks actually are, especially because the number of satellites that SpaceX is proposing is greater than the number they’ve already launched,” he says...
>
> [...]
> https://spectrum.ieee.org/starlink-vleo-below-iss
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>
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Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos