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<p>Not so fast! A number of issues here, and one of them is that the
question itself is unclear. There are several levels of "working":</p>
<ul>
<li>A satellite forwarding uplink traffic to an adjacent peer
within the same orbital plane for downlink.</li>
<ul>
<li>Dto for cross-plane<br>
</li>
</ul>
<li>A satellite forwarding incoming laser link traffic to another
satellite in the same orbital plane.</li>
<ul>
<li>Dto for cross-plane</li>
</ul>
<li>Routing to select destinations only.</li>
<li>Routing to everywhere.</li>
<li>Doing so efficiently globally under load.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm pretty sure that they are managing somewhere around the first
3-4 major bullet points by now, with probably some outages (I note
that Starlink now advertises global maritime coverage, at a price
around 10 times that of a land-based subscription). But the last
point is where it truly gets hard.</p>
<p>The other thing worth remembering is that distance isn't
necessarily a good indicator - it depends on where that distance
accrues. Southern California to southern BC is around 2000 km, and
the zone around the US-Canada border is where satellite density is
highest - and capacity attracts in Starlink. Note also that
gateways are generally in spots where there is little obstruction
in terms of elevation, so in the case of Vancouver BC can probably
serve birds that are just a few degrees over the horizon (which
also helps keeping the beam out of geostationary trouble). Read: a
lot stays bent pipe. <br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 21/03/2023 12:46 am, Mike Puchol via
Starlink wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:1d011404-0382-4948-ac90-5fa321b749a7@Spark">
<title></title>
<div name="messageBodySection">
<div dir="auto">I tested them in the middle of nowhere
(literally) and it worked, no gateways anywhere even close.
Latencies varied between 20-30ms and up to 400ms (to the POP),
and there were occasional outages. <br>
<br>
What was fascinating was that I could predict when an outage
would take place by watching starlink.sx and seeing that the
ISL-linked satellites would dissapear from view with no others
to take over, and also predicting when I'd have service again
by watching the next ISL-linked sat approach the
field-of-view.<br>
<br>
The other test I did was, while watching the tracker and the
azimuth to the satellite, place myself at the right position
between the antenna and the satellite, and confirm that the
link would drop.<br>
<br>
All of the above was possible because a) there weren't that
many ISL satellites in orbit at the time, and b) the density
of satellites in the region I was testing was low, so only 1-2
satellites could be serving my location at a time, making
tests easier. </div>
</div>
<div name="messageSignatureSection"><br>
<div class="matchFont">Best,<br>
<br>
Mike</div>
</div>
<div name="messageReplySection">On Mar 20, 2023 at 12:32 +0100,
Dave Taht via Starlink <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net"><starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net></a>,
wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey;
border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px
5px;padding-left: 10px;">We haven't heard much about the
starlink ISL links lately. Any sign<br>
they are working anywhere yet?<br>
<br>
On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 7:33 AM Christian von der Ropp via
Starlink<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net"><starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net></a> wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><br>
All-optical switching could greatly reduce complexity and
power<br>
consumption on the satellites at the cost of flexibility. Up
to 44<br>
satellites in an orbital plane would use individual
wavelengths which<br>
would be passed on transparently down the daisy chain and
only<br>
satellites in range of gateways would convert the optical
signals back<br>
into electrical ones, and send them down to earth while they
pass a<br>
gateway. This would result in relatively short duty cycles,
hence less<br>
power draw per orbit and less heat dissipation issues.<br>
<br>
Actually I've been suspecting that the SDA targets
all-optical switching<br>
for the Transport Layer constellation as I don't seen any
other<br>
immediate reason for the requirement of their OISL standard
to require<br>
wavelength switching within the ITU channel grid for LCTs
(see p. 18 of<br>
the OISL 3.0:<br>
<a href="https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SDA-OCT-Standard-v3.0.pdf)" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SDA-OCT-Standard-v3.0.pdf)</a><br>
<br>
As a matter of fact tuneable wavelenghts were already
required in the<br>
draft version of the OISL standard published in April 2020:<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/Megaconstellati/status/1310336728595562499" moz-do-not-send="true">https://twitter.com/Megaconstellati/status/1310336728595562499</a><br>
<br>
-Christian<br>
<br>
Am 19.03.2023 um 16:16 schrieb Brandon Butterworth via
Starlink:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">On Sat Mar 18, 2023 at 03:19:49PM
-0700, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Today, this about google's mems
switching tech hit,<br>
</blockquote>
They've been talking about it since last year, seems to
have got<br>
a hype bump recently.<br>
<br>
Who expected circuit switching to make a comeback?<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I keep wondering where else it
could be applied.<br>
</blockquote>
They've been used for a long time, eg almost 20 years ago
-<br>
<a href="https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog32/presentations/zwart.pdf" moz-do-not-send="true">https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog32/presentations/zwart.pdf</a><br>
<br>
There is a goal of optical packet switching, until then
you're<br>
limited to where there are limited flows of long enough
duration<br>
to make the change from packet to circuit switching
viable. So mostly<br>
automated testing.<br>
<br>
I've dabbled with the idea in an archive use case where
very few of<br>
a large set of storage nodes need to connect to a moderate
number<br>
of servers. For some cases we could have zero switches.
The goal was<br>
a mostly dark infrastructure and many 1000s of storage
nodes,<br>
removing the switches saves a lot of power.<br>
<br>
Commercial optical switches are expensive so I was looking
at<br>
making an optical strowger as I wanted a high fan out not<br>
large n^2.<br>
<br>
In the mobile world they are looking at doing flexible
bandwidth<br>
per node with coherent optics over gpon fibre plant,
allocating<br>
variable amounts of spectrum to each, which could be
adapted to a<br>
similar circuit model. It'd be no use to google as they
want the<br>
full bandwidth between each node but as dwdm coherent
optic costs<br>
come down you could imagine doing the same with a full
channel<br>
between each pair, so like a conventional WSS but cheaper.
If it<br>
wasn't for the optics cost I suspect they'd have done that
reducing<br>
switching time to a channel change.<br>
<br>
brandon<br>
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<br>
<br>
--<br>
Come Heckle Mar 6-9 at: <a href="https://www.understandinglatency.com/" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.understandinglatency.com/</a><br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
The University of Auckland
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