[Starlink] musk on mean latency

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

I would rather like starlink to get latency for
voip/gaming/videoconferencing down to consistently (99.8%) below 40ms.

from https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/01/13/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-starlink-mission-from-cape-canaveral/…
“The biggest, single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is
to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds,” Musk said.

mean latency is a somewhat wrong goal. It misses the impact of slow
start. I figure he is mostly describing the difficult layer 2 work it
requires to accomplish that, everything from doing sat handoffs and
rerouting stuff on the ground, to needing more ground stations, which
is indeed a giant task.  I keep hoping that in particular they get
away from the "recalculate connectivity and bandwidth every 15
seconds", into something more responsive for normal traffic. DNS
servers on the sats would help too! and does not fit into the concept
of "mean latency" at all.

... and me, all I want to see is cake on the "glitchy", fq_codel on
the wifi, and for them to find some way to leverage at least some of
the techniques in LibreQos (like ebpf and cake) to somehow manage
their downlinks better.

It does look like they are now achieving sub 30ms latency to 1.1.1.1
in some places for dns.

https://home.sjh.at/starlinksmokeping/?target=DNS.CloudflareDNS1


-- 
40 years of net history, a couple songs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RGX6QFm5E
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos