[Starlink] thinking about the laser links again

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

I haven't really been focused on the starlink stuff for many months,
although I do periodically run a test to see if they've fixed their
bufferbloat anywhere. (nope). The networkQuality test from apple is
now shipping in OSX!! and I can think about something else.

I'd written this, I guess, over 2 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/brn6gg/will_starlink_have_bufferbloat/

and had had a nice dialog with mark handley (who has since stopped
writing anything about starlink so I kind of assume he went under NDA)

At the time I first started thinking about this I had had a few
objections to his simulations. One was that he made the assumption in
his earliest simulations that the sats would be routing "up there"
rather than down here. The first sats routed simply to the next hop or
a failover hop and that is easy to think about (and the congestion
problems soluble with the tools already developed by the bufferbloat
project). His later sims did that, but neither set seemed to address
congestion control issues.

Now that the first laser sats are launching, thinking about how that
would work, in the dearth of other information, is hard. One number I
don't have is what the actual capacity is for each laser link
(anyone?), and for how long. I'd also thought at the time I'd written
the above that the value of going new york to tokyo primarily by
satellite was a license to print money. The value of that path seemed
to be in the millions/minute range - so I had generally assumed that
usage of it would be governed by a virtual circuit setup, used
internally, or by major governments, or investment houses. It made the
most sense to me to terminate most links back to the ground as quickly
as possible, otherwise.

But in thinking about 33,000 sats... rather than the paltry (cough)
few they've presently flown, as a giant LAG switch that can cross
oceans, I can certainly see the concept being used for more general
purpose traffic especially to the islands of the world. That gets me
to my second question: of the field of view of the sat links?

And then my humdinger question based on their launch schedule and
satellite distribution... how long before they can get a first transit
from new york (or london) to tokyo, borne entirely on the sat laser
links themselves? It needn't be direct, just taking advantage of the
known satellite laser links to get that far.


-- 
Fixing Starlink's Latencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw

Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC