David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:
    > We don't know what their routing in space is. But we know that it isn't just
    > up to a single satellite and back down to a ground station.

If the "routing" was all based upon a connecting a circuit from a dishy
to a ground station, and they never look into the packets, then it sounds
like bent pipe to me.  Even though the specific physical path would change
every ~15 minutes.
One could do this with a variety of technologies, but I'd probably use MPLS.

OTH, if a dishy could be moved from one ground station to another, then
that's a different matter.

    > But I will say that since they NAT the connection at the ground station (or
    > Internet peering point), and not allowing dishy-to-dishy direct

I don't think that the l3 NAT44 is particularly relevant in this case.
One could easily allow for dishy-to-dishy "behind" the NAT, but it requires
an L3 decision point before the NAT44/Internet-Peering-Point.

I thought that there was many with working IPv6?
(but not all)