Re: [Starlink] Starlink "beam spread"

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

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There's another aspect here that is often overlooked when looking purely 
at the data rate that you can get from your fibre/cable/wifi/satellite, 
and this is where the data comes from.

A large percentage of Internet content these days comes from content 
delivery networks (CDNs). These innately work on the assumption that 
it's the core of the Internet that presents a bottleneck, and that the 
aggregate bandwidth of all last mile connections is high in comparison. 
A second assumption is that a large share of the content that gets 
requested gets requested many times, and many times by users in the same 
corner(s) of the Internet. The conclusion is that therefore content is 
best served from a location close to the end user, so as to keep RTTs 
low and - importantly - keep the load of long distance bottleneck links.

Now it's fairly clear that large numbers of fibres to end users make for 
the best kind of network between CDN and end user. Local WiFi hotspots 
with limited range allow frequency re-use, as do ground based cellular 
networks, so they're OK, too, in that respect.  But anything that needs 
to project RF energy over a longer distance to get directly to the end 
user hasn't got nature on its side.

This is, IMHO, Starlink's biggest design flaw at the moment: Going 
direct to end user site rather providing a bridge to a local ISP may be 
circumventing the lack of last mile infrastructure in the US, but it 
also makes incredibly inefficient use of spectrum and satellite 
resource. If every viral cat video that a thousand Starlink users in 
Iowa are just dying to see literally has to go to space a thousand times 
and back again rather than once, you arguably have a problem.

And yes, small neighbourhood networks of the type Mike described could 
put a significant dent into that problem. But do Starlink actually see 
Mike supplying 100 people as helpful, or do they see it as 99 customers 
they can no longer sell a dishy to? Given how they push their services 
into the market, I suspect it might be the latter.

On 31/08/2022 10:07 am, Brandon Butterworth via Starlink wrote:
> On Tue Aug 30, 2022 at 02:01:49PM -0700, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
> > You are absolutly correct that people who can get fiber (and 
> probably even
> > most DSL) are far better using that than Starlink, and
> > last-few-hundred-meters wireless can be better (like DSL, it depends 
> on the
> > exact service available)
> ...
> > People who can get that sort of service are not the target users for
> > Starlink.
>
> But unless Starlink turn them away some will still take the
> service despite better options.
>
> I do UK FWA and FTTP in rural areas and know others in the
> industry. Some have reported being turned down as the
> odd customer is waiting for Starlink (instead of taking a
> government GBP4k+ subsidy giving them free fibre/FWA install)
>
> There's no telling some people.
>
> brandon
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-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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