From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail.lang.hm (045-059-245-186.biz.spectrum.com [45.59.245.186]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ADH-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by lists.bufferbloat.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 294533B2A4 for ; Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:19:08 -0500 (EST) Received: from dlang-mobile (unknown [10.2.3.133]) by mail.lang.hm (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E59A1C5F58; Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:19:07 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:19:07 -0800 (PST) From: David Lang To: Ulrich Speidel cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <28ro46p9-5620-9qr2-829q-3s0on13q6po6@ynat.uz> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; BOUNDARY="===============2962499995387877291==" Subject: Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published X-BeenThere: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: "Starlink has bufferbloat. Bad." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2024 23:19:08 -0000 This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. --===============2962499995387877291== Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote: > My most serious concern about Starlink as a system remains the fact that it > puts a pipe between the end user and the first network hop (the satellite) > that is in principle very difficult to scale: There's only so much extra > spectrum one can use, spatial diversity (beamforming) has limited potential, > and unlike in cellular networks, you can't really shrink the cell size to > accommodate more end users through frequency re-use as your cell size is > determined to a good part by orbital altitude. That all but rules out the > scaling effects that CDNs have brought to the rest of the Internet, which > keep orders of magnitude worth of traffic off long distance cables. There > simply isn't an obvious place in LEO topology to put a cache that'll produce > a decent number of hits while being able to serve this content to end users > through a large collective bandwidth. > > The interesting question for me is how much we can scale Starlink and its > up-and-coming cousins from the few million users Starlink has now. To 100 > million? To 200 million? Half a billion even? If you are in an area where the cell companies are investing in smaller cells, then you are not in a Starlink target area. There are large areas with poor or non-existant cell coverage. Outside the US, scaling of Starlink can happen just by providing coverage to locations that don't yet have coverage with no additional satellites. In terms of scaling existing areas, larger antennas can reduce cell size, you can have more than one satellite cover a given cell, they are looking at eventually having lower satellites, which again will let them reduce the cell size. David Lang --===============2962499995387877291== Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: BASE64 Content-ID: Content-Description: Content-Disposition: INLINE X19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX19fX18KU3Rhcmxpbmsg bWFpbGluZyBsaXN0ClN0YXJsaW5rQGxpc3RzLmJ1ZmZlcmJsb2F0Lm5ldApodHRwczovL2xpc3Rz LmJ1ZmZlcmJsb2F0Lm5ldC9saXN0aW5mby9zdGFybGluawo= --===============2962499995387877291==--