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.

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.

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.

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.

On Mar 20, 2023 at 12:32 +0100, Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>, wrote:

We haven't heard much about the starlink ISL links lately. Any sign
they are working anywhere yet?

On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 7:33 AM Christian von der Ropp via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

All-optical switching could greatly reduce complexity and power
consumption on the satellites at the cost of flexibility. Up to 44
satellites in an orbital plane would use individual wavelengths which
would be passed on transparently down the daisy chain and only
satellites in range of gateways would convert the optical signals back
into electrical ones, and send them down to earth while they pass a
gateway. This would result in relatively short duty cycles, hence less
power draw per orbit and less heat dissipation issues.

Actually I've been suspecting that the SDA targets all-optical switching
for the Transport Layer constellation as I don't seen any other
immediate reason for the requirement of their OISL standard to require
wavelength switching within the ITU channel grid for LCTs (see p. 18 of
the OISL 3.0:
https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SDA-OCT-Standard-v3.0.pdf)

As a matter of fact tuneable wavelenghts were already required in the
draft version of the OISL standard published in April 2020:
https://twitter.com/Megaconstellati/status/1310336728595562499

-Christian

Am 19.03.2023 um 16:16 schrieb Brandon Butterworth via Starlink:

On Sat Mar 18, 2023 at 03:19:49PM -0700, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:

Today, this about google's mems switching tech hit,

They've been talking about it since last year, seems to have got
a hype bump recently.

Who expected circuit switching to make a comeback?

I keep wondering where else it could be applied.

They've been used for a long time, eg almost 20 years ago -
https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog32/presentations/zwart.pdf

There is a goal of optical packet switching, until then you're
limited to where there are limited flows of long enough duration
to make the change from packet to circuit switching viable. So mostly
automated testing.

I've dabbled with the idea in an archive use case where very few of
a large set of storage nodes need to connect to a moderate number
of servers. For some cases we could have zero switches. The goal was
a mostly dark infrastructure and many 1000s of storage nodes,
removing the switches saves a lot of power.

Commercial optical switches are expensive so I was looking at
making an optical strowger as I wanted a high fan out not
large n^2.

In the mobile world they are looking at doing flexible bandwidth
per node with coherent optics over gpon fibre plant, allocating
variable amounts of spectrum to each, which could be adapted to a
similar circuit model. It'd be no use to google as they want the
full bandwidth between each node but as dwdm coherent optic costs
come down you could imagine doing the same with a full channel
between each pair, so like a conventional WSS but cheaper. If it
wasn't for the optics cost I suspect they'd have done that reducing
switching time to a channel change.

brandon
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