Re: [Starlink] It’s the Latency, FCC

Colin_Higbie
2024-04-30T19:31:07Z

Gene,

I think the lion's share of other people (many brilliant people here) on this thread are focused on keeping latency down when under load. I generally just read and don't contribute on those discussions, because that's not my area of expertise. I only posted my point on bandwidth, not to detract from the importance of reducing latency, but to correct what I believed to be an important error on minimum bandwidth required to be able to perform standard Internet functions.

To my surprise, there was pushback on the figure, so I've responded to try to educate this group on streaming usage in the hope that the people working on the latency problem under load (core reason for this group to exist) can also be aware of the minimum bandwidth needs to ensure they don't plan based on bad assumptions.

For a single user, minimum bandwidth (independent of latency) needs to be at least 25Mbps assuming the goal is to provide access to all standard Internet services. Anything short of that will deny users access to the primary streaming services, and more specifically won't be able to watch 4K HDR video, which is the market standard for streaming services today and likely will remain at that level for the next several years.

I think it's fine to offer lower-cost options that don't deliver 4K HDR video (not everyone cares about that), but at least 25Mbps should be available to an Internet customer for any new Internet service rollout.

Cheers,
Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: Starlink <starlink-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net> On Behalf Of starlink-request@lists.bufferbloat.net
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 3:05 PM
To: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Starlink Digest, Vol 37, Issue 15

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 09:04:43 -1000
From: Eugene Y Chang <eugene.chang@ieee.org>
To: Colin_Higbie <CHigbie1@Higbie.name>, Dave Taht via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Starlink] It’s the Latency, FCC
Message-ID: <438B1BC4-D465-497A-B6BA-700E1D411036@ieee.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I am always surprised how complicated these discussions become. (Surprised mostly because I forgot the kind of issues this community care about.) The discussion doesn’t shed light on the following scenarios.

While watching stream content, activating controls needed to switch content sometimes (often?) have long pauses. I attribute that to buffer bloat and high latency.

With a happy household user watching streaming media, a second user could have terrible shopping experience with Amazon. The interactive response could be (is often) horrible. (Personally, I would be doing email and working on a shared doc. The Amazon analogy probably applies to more people.)

How can we deliver graceful performance to both persons in a household?
Is seeking graceful performance too complicated to improve?
(I said “graceful” to allow technical flexibility.)

Gene
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Eugene Chang