[Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Nitinder Mohan]

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Hi folks,

Our comprehensive multifaceted measurement study looking at Starlink global and last-mile performance is now available online: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09242. 

TL;DR: See the summary in this nice teaser video we made: https://youtu.be/WtE3MoK8J80 

We looked at several third-party measurement sources (M-Lab, RIPE Atlas) and performed our own measurements over multiple Starlink dishes to uncover the following:

1. How different is Starlink network performance globally? How do ground station and PoP availability impact performance?
2. How much latency is consumed by the satellite part of the link?
3. Is Starlink connection affected by bufferbloat?
4. Are satellite handovers the root-cause of Starlink 15-sec reconfigurations?
5. How good is Starlink compared to terrestrial cellular networks for real-time applications, specifically Cloud Gaming and Zoom.

The study has been accepted and will appear in ACM The Web Conference 2024 (WWW), which is a flagship venue that has historically housed several pioneering works central to Internet success.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions related to the work. 

P.S. We also thanked this mailing list in our paper for providing us several key insights and inquisitive discussions :)

Thanks and Regards

Nitinder Mohan
Technical University Munich (TUM)
https://www.nitindermohan.com/

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Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[J Pan]

very nice paper and video---we've updated the reference to your work
as well. cheers.  -j
--
J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan@UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan



On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 10:13 AM Nitinder Mohan via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> Our comprehensive multifaceted measurement study looking at Starlink global and last-mile performance is now available online: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09242.
>
> TL;DR: See the summary in this nice teaser video we made: https://youtu.be/WtE3MoK8J80
>
> We looked at several third-party measurement sources (M-Lab, RIPE Atlas) and performed our own measurements over multiple Starlink dishes to uncover the following:
>
> 1. How different is Starlink network performance globally? How do ground station and PoP availability impact performance?
> 2. How much latency is consumed by the satellite part of the link?
> 3. Is Starlink connection affected by bufferbloat?
> 4. Are satellite handovers the root-cause of Starlink 15-sec reconfigurations?
> 5. How good is Starlink compared to terrestrial cellular networks for real-time applications, specifically Cloud Gaming and Zoom.
>
> The study has been accepted and will appear in ACM The Web Conference 2024 (WWW), which is a flagship venue that has historically housed several pioneering works central to Internet success.
>
> Feel free to let me know if you have any questions related to the work.
>
> P.S. We also thanked this mailing list in our paper for providing us several key insights and inquisitive discussions :)
>
> Thanks and Regards
>
> Nitinder Mohan
> Technical University Munich (TUM)
> https://www.nitindermohan.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Dave Taht]

While nobody reads footnotes much, and I would really like you to cite
this as the instigator of a lot of research into this area, also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw

because of all that rage and frustration is what keyed off 3 years of
effort. Think of it as newton noticed an apple, falling from a tree.

This is also a good cite, in terms of flavoring your methods to a
level that I can tolerate.

https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2014/doc/slides/137.pdf

I will go through more of the footnotes when I have time, starting
with the first.

It is also plausible that Starlink employs active queue management (AQM)
techniques [1] to moderate uplink latencies under congestion.

Um... it does not look like it to my eye. Just a overly short packet
FIFO. I haven´t torn it apart lately however. You can easily tell the
difference in packet loss behaviors by tearing apart rrul packet
captures.

On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 1:13 PM Nitinder Mohan via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> Our comprehensive multifaceted measurement study looking at Starlink global and last-mile performance is now available online: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09242.
>
> TL;DR: See the summary in this nice teaser video we made: https://youtu.be/WtE3MoK8J80
>
> We looked at several third-party measurement sources (M-Lab, RIPE Atlas) and performed our own measurements over multiple Starlink dishes to uncover the following:
>
> 1. How different is Starlink network performance globally? How do ground station and PoP availability impact performance?
> 2. How much latency is consumed by the satellite part of the link?
> 3. Is Starlink connection affected by bufferbloat?
> 4. Are satellite handovers the root-cause of Starlink 15-sec reconfigurations?
> 5. How good is Starlink compared to terrestrial cellular networks for real-time applications, specifically Cloud Gaming and Zoom.
>
> The study has been accepted and will appear in ACM The Web Conference 2024 (WWW), which is a flagship venue that has historically housed several pioneering works central to Internet success.
>
> Feel free to let me know if you have any questions related to the work.
>
> P.S. We also thanked this mailing list in our paper for providing us several key insights and inquisitive discussions :)
>
> Thanks and Regards
>
> Nitinder Mohan
> Technical University Munich (TUM)
> https://www.nitindermohan.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink



-- 
https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/2024_predictions/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Ulrich Speidel]

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Thanks for that! Another few interesting pieces to the jigsaw puzzle.

I've been a bit reluctant to enter the performance measurement game 
around Starlink myself, chiefly because it's a moving target in more 
than one sense, so essentially you end up producing (nevertheless 
useful) snapshots. There's the rapid growth in satellite numbers and 
hence the associated change in Dishy behaviour and improved performance 
in conditions where Dishy has obstructions to deal with. There's the 
advent of the ISLs. There's also the fact that we don't know which 
underlying changes are made by SpaceX in terms of network configuration.

5G is also a moving target in its own right.

Handovers: I think it's important to consider that while your Dishy 
might not get handed over, others operating via the same satellite might 
move away and yet others again might join the satellite you're on. So 
it's not just the potential of you moving away to a satellite that looks 
different in terms of load, it's also a matter of your satellite's 
capacity changing during someone else getting handed over to it with 
cwnd wide open and being allocated fewer slots than before. But, again, 
as mentioned above, good on SpaceX if they're using some form of AQM to 
try and manage this.

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?

On 27/02/2024 7:12 am, Nitinder Mohan via Starlink wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Our comprehensive multifaceted measurement study looking at Starlink 
> global and last-mile performance is now available online: 
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09242 
> <https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09242>. 
>
>
> TL;DR: See the summary in this nice teaser video we made: 
> https://youtu.be/WtE3MoK8J80 
> <https://youtu.be/WtE3MoK8J80> 
>
>
> We looked at several third-party measurement sources (M-Lab, RIPE 
> Atlas) and performed our own measurements over multiple Starlink 
> dishes to uncover the following:
>
> 1. How different is Starlink network performance globally? How do 
> ground station and PoP availability impact performance?
> 2. How much latency is consumed by the satellite part of the link?
> 3. Is Starlink connection affected by bufferbloat?
> 4. Are satellite handovers the root-cause of Starlink 15-sec 
> reconfigurations?
> 5. How good is Starlink compared to terrestrial cellular networks for 
> real-time applications, specifically Cloud Gaming and Zoom.
>
> The study has been accepted and will appear in ACM The Web Conference 
> 2024 
> <https://www2024.thewebconf.org> (WWW), 
> which is a flagship venue that has historically housed several 
> pioneering works central to Internet success.
>
> Feel free to let me know if you have any questions related to the work.
>
> P.S. We also thanked this mailing list in our paper for providing us 
> several key insights and inquisitive discussions :)
>
> Thanks and Regards
>
> Nitinder Mohan
> Technical University Munich (TUM)
> https://www.nitindermohan.com/ 
> <https://www.nitindermohan.com/>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>
-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************



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Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[David Lang]

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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

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_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Ulrich Speidel]

On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
> 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. 

Hm. I'm in Auckland, which is where cell companies are investing in 
smaller cells, and Starlink did a leaflet drop here last year trying to 
get customers.

> 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.
But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or 
politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
>
> 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.

Lower orbit = more drag = shorter lifetime, and the reduction in 
footprint isn't actually that significant. Larger antennas = fewer sats 
per launch = more expensive system.

If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over 
time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed. If 
you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a factor 
of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce footprint to 
a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about antenna 
sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in terms 
of capacity as long as our user density is the same. It also buys us an 
extra 6 dB in received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per 
symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3 
bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in 
gain or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns into a game of 
diminishing margins pretty quickly, too. But now you want to serve 
cellphones on the ground which have smaller antennas by a factor of I'd 
say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to make your antennas in space 
16 times larger just to maintain what you had with Dishy. That's a far 
cry from what is needed to get from two million or so customers to 
supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that, we need a 
factor of 1000.

And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you 
wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client. 
And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over 
again through the same pipe, too.

-- 

****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[David Lang]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:

> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:

>> 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.
> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or 
> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)

per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those areas are 
ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even to cell towers or 
wireless ISP towers)

There are governments politically disinclined to allow cell service, not so much 
the users. And some of the opposition is not opposition to Internet service, but 
rather being protective of existing providers. Protectionism can be defeated in 
time.

>> 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.
>
> Lower orbit = more drag = shorter lifetime, and the reduction in footprint 
> isn't actually that significant. Larger antennas = fewer sats per launch = 
> more expensive system.

and at the same time SpaceX is working to massivly reduce the launch costs.

> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over 
> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.

If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible backup). 
SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be competitive to 
fibre

if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.

> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a factor of 
> 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce footprint to a 
> quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about antenna sidelobes. 
> But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in terms of capacity as 
> long as our user density is the same. It also buys us an extra 6 dB in 
> received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per symbol. That's another 
> factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3 bits/symbol. Larger antennas: 
> Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in gain or an extra bit per symbol. So 
> that turns into a game of diminishing margins pretty quickly, too.

add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and you can 
get a noticable multiple as well

>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller 
> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to make 
> your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had with 
> Dishy.

the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an emergancy 
contact capability

> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so customers 
> to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that, we need a 
> factor of 1000.

without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, it's going 
to be really hard to get concrete arguments.

Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have now, and the 
full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth of the V1s (don't know 
how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a factor of 100x there. Is another 10x 
in the under-served areas being in less dense areas really that hard to believe?

And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't have to 
serve everyone.

> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you 
> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client. And 
> then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over again 
> through the same pipe, too.

True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share one 
satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead or unused 
upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement caches.

David Lang

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Ulrich Speidel]

All good points ... see below.

On 27/02/2024 2:13 pm, David Lang wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>
>> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or 
>> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
>
> per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those 
> areas are ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even 
> to cell towers or wireless ISP towers)
The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the 
scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.
>
> There are governments politically disinclined to allow cell service, 
> not so much the users. And some of the opposition is not opposition to 
> Internet service, but rather being protective of existing providers. 
> Protectionism can be defeated in time.
Tick.
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Lower orbit = more drag = shorter lifetime, and the reduction in 
>> footprint isn't actually that significant. Larger antennas = fewer 
>> sats per launch = more expensive system.
>
> and at the same time SpaceX is working to massivly reduce the launch 
> costs.
Yep, but much of the gains there have been made.
>
>
>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints 
>> over time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
>
> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a 
> possible backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never 
> going to be competitive to fibre
>
> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how 
many of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?
>
>> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a 
>> factor of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce 
>> footprint to a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry 
>> about antenna sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a 
>> factor of 4 in terms of capacity as long as our user density is the 
>> same. It also buys us an extra 6 dB in received signal power and 
>> hence an extra 2 bits per symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best 
>> if you go from 1 to 3 bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna 
>> size gives you 3 dB in gain or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns 
>> into a game of diminishing margins pretty quickly, too.
>
> add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and 
> you can get a noticable multiple as well
Not in terms of capacity - but in terms of a better distribution of it. 
Already happening - most places can now "see" dozens of Starlink 
satellites above the horizon.
>
>
>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have 
>> smaller antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So 
>> you need to make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to 
>> maintain what you had with Dishy.
>
> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an 
> emergancy contact capability

Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much 
more than just an emergency contact capability:

https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/

(Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're 
going to get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the 
small print!)

>
>> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so 
>> customers to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For 
>> that, we need a factor of 1000.
>
> without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, 
> it's going to be really hard to get concrete arguments.
>
> Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have 
> now, and the full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth 
> of the V1s (don't know how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a 
> factor of 100x there. 

It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just 
adding transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, 
then even if the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't 
translate into as much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra 
Hertz, and in terms of spatial beam separation. The former is limited in 
that they don't make any more of it, and the latter is a matter of 
antenna size and getting antenna side lobes sufficiently far down. And 
we know that SpaceX are running close to spectral capacity in some areas.

Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is 
somewhat similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of 
densities, we need that factor of 1000.

> Is another 10x in the under-served areas being in less dense areas 
> really that hard to believe?
>
> And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't 
> have to serve everyone.
So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink 
& Co over today?
>
>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity 
>> you wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per 
>> client. And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over 
>> and over again through the same pipe, too.
>
> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to 
> share one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping 
> overhead or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can 
> implement caches.

Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still 
focuses on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.

-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[David Lang]

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On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:

> All good points ... see below.
>
> On 27/02/2024 2:13 pm, David Lang wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>> 
>>> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
>> 
>>>> 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.
>>> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or 
>>> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
>> 
>> per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those areas 
>> are ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even to cell 
>> towers or wireless ISP towers)
> The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the 
> scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.

I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed doesn't 
matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options matters 
more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other options (and 
I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly densely 
populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically test it 
and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.

>>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over 
>>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
>> 
>> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible 
>> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be 
>> competitive to fibre
>> 
>> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
> Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how many 
> of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?

what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B under-connected?

(and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up connection, 
what is the definition of 'under-connected'?, see the revoking of the grant to 
SpaceX for providing such service after they changed the definition of minimum 
acceptable connectivity and then proactively declared that Starlink will not 
meet it several years out)

>>> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a 
>>> factor of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce 
>>> footprint to a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about 
>>> antenna sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in 
>>> terms of capacity as long as our user density is the same. It also buys us 
>>> an extra 6 dB in received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per 
>>> symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3 
>>> bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in gain 
>>> or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns into a game of diminishing 
>>> margins pretty quickly, too.
>> 
>> add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and you 
>> can get a noticable multiple as well
> Not in terms of capacity - but in terms of a better distribution of it. 
> Already happening - most places can now "see" dozens of Starlink satellites 
> above the horizon.

but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell 
is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.

>>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller 
>>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to 
>>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had 
>>> with Dishy.
>> 
>> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an 
>> emergancy contact capability
>
> Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much more 
> than just an emergency contact capability:
>
> https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/
>
> (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're going to 
> get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)

yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been pretty vocal 
that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available 
bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should always work, 
voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will happen, 
but will be slow due to the sharing.

>>> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so 
>>> customers to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that, 
>>> we need a factor of 1000.
>> 
>> without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, it's 
>> going to be really hard to get concrete arguments.
>> 
>> Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have now, and 
>> the full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth of the V1s 
>> (don't know how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a factor of 100x 
>> there. 
>
> It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just adding 
> transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, then even if 
> the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate into as 
> much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in terms of 
> spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't make any 
> more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting antenna 
> side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are running close 
> to spectral capacity in some areas.

I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites (~45k 
satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan to be able 
to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am speculating 
about this.

> Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is somewhat 
> similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, we need 
> that factor of 1000.

I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a luxury, not a 
lifeline. I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than 
the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and awareness of 
Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.

I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, including in 
built-up areas.

>> Is another 10x in the under-served areas being in less dense areas really 
>> that hard to believe?
>> 
>> And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't have 
>> to serve everyone.
> So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink & Co 
> over today?

not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more 
optomistic about it than you are.

>>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you 
>>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client. 
>>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over 
>>> again through the same pipe, too.
>> 
>> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share 
>> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead 
>> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement 
>> caches.
>
> Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still focuses 
> on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.

SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very 
high-performance community gateways.

I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.

I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one 
uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy 
kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of 
the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and 
don't forget the need for power for the system)

David Lang

[Starlink] starlink business peering

[Dave Taht]

Starlink has described how to peer with them extensively now. It is
still kind of confusing to me - say I had fios to the business, and a
AS that met their requirements, I could also somehow dual home that AS
to my starlink terminal, and it would be a business class service
required?

https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/peering-with-starlink


On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 1:21 AM David Lang via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>
> > All good points ... see below.
> >
> > On 27/02/2024 2:13 pm, David Lang wrote:
> >> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
> >>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
> >>
> >>>> 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.
> >>> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or
> >>> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
> >>
> >> per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those areas
> >> are ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even to cell
> >> towers or wireless ISP towers)
> > The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the
> > scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.
>
> I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed doesn't
> matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options matters
> more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other options (and
> I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly densely
> populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically test it
> and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.
>
> >>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over
> >>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
> >>
> >> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible
> >> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be
> >> competitive to fibre
> >>
> >> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
> > Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how many
> > of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?
>
> what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B under-connected?
>
> (and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up connection,
> what is the definition of 'under-connected'?, see the revoking of the grant to
> SpaceX for providing such service after they changed the definition of minimum
> acceptable connectivity and then proactively declared that Starlink will not
> meet it several years out)
>
> >>> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a
> >>> factor of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce
> >>> footprint to a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about
> >>> antenna sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in
> >>> terms of capacity as long as our user density is the same. It also buys us
> >>> an extra 6 dB in received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per
> >>> symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3
> >>> bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in gain
> >>> or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns into a game of diminishing
> >>> margins pretty quickly, too.
> >>
> >> add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and you
> >> can get a noticable multiple as well
> > Not in terms of capacity - but in terms of a better distribution of it.
> > Already happening - most places can now "see" dozens of Starlink satellites
> > above the horizon.
>
> but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell
> is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
>
> >>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller
> >>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to
> >>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had
> >>> with Dishy.
> >>
> >> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an
> >> emergancy contact capability
> >
> > Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much more
> > than just an emergency contact capability:
> >
> > https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/
> >
> > (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're going to
> > get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)
>
> yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been pretty vocal
> that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available
> bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should always work,
> voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will happen,
> but will be slow due to the sharing.
>
> >>> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so
> >>> customers to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that,
> >>> we need a factor of 1000.
> >>
> >> without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, it's
> >> going to be really hard to get concrete arguments.
> >>
> >> Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have now, and
> >> the full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth of the V1s
> >> (don't know how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a factor of 100x
> >> there.
> >
> > It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just adding
> > transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, then even if
> > the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate into as
> > much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in terms of
> > spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't make any
> > more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting antenna
> > side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are running close
> > to spectral capacity in some areas.
>
> I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites (~45k
> satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan to be able
> to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am speculating
> about this.
>
> > Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is somewhat
> > similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, we need
> > that factor of 1000.
>
> I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a luxury, not a
> lifeline. I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than
> the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and awareness of
> Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.
>
> I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, including in
> built-up areas.
>
> >> Is another 10x in the under-served areas being in less dense areas really
> >> that hard to believe?
> >>
> >> And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't have
> >> to serve everyone.
> > So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink & Co
> > over today?
>
> not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more
> optomistic about it than you are.
>
> >>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you
> >>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client.
> >>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over
> >>> again through the same pipe, too.
> >>
> >> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share
> >> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead
> >> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement
> >> caches.
> >
> > Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still focuses
> > on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.
>
> SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
> high-performance community gateways.
>
> I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
>
> I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one
> uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy
> kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of
> the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and
> don't forget the need for power for the system)
>
> David Lang_______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink



-- 
https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/2024_predictions/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [Starlink] starlink business peering

[David Lang]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 9794 bytes --]

As I read that page, it's talking about landline ISPs peering with the Starlink 
gateways, not with the Starlink endpoints. There is no service required, it's 
just connectivity at the PoP for your network to better support all Starlink 
users.

you don't need to have any Starlink service, let alone a business class service.

I don't think that they are considering the option of BGP at the dishy. When I 
talked to them a few months ago about the public IP that's available for 
business services, it was clear that that IP is dynamically assigned. It doesn't 
change frequently, but can change on every reboot or on some network outages.

David Lang


On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Dave Taht wrote:

> Starlink has described how to peer with them extensively now. It is
> still kind of confusing to me - say I had fios to the business, and a
> AS that met their requirements, I could also somehow dual home that AS
> to my starlink terminal, and it would be a business class service
> required?
>
> https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/peering-with-starlink
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 1:21 AM David Lang via Starlink
> <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>>
>>> All good points ... see below.
>>>
>>> On 27/02/2024 2:13 pm, David Lang wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 27/02/2024 12:19 pm, David Lang wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>> But what's the population of these areas? Generally quite sparse. (Or
>>>>> politically disinclined to accept Starlink service)
>>>>
>>>> per square mile? low. But there are a LOT of square miles, and those areas
>>>> are ones where it's very expensive per-user to run fiber (even to cell
>>>> towers or wireless ISP towers)
>>> The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the
>>> scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.
>>
>> I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed doesn't
>> matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options matters
>> more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other options (and
>> I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly densely
>> populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically test it
>> and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.
>>
>>>>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over
>>>>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
>>>>
>>>> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible
>>>> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be
>>>> competitive to fibre
>>>>
>>>> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
>>> Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how many
>>> of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?
>>
>> what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B under-connected?
>>
>> (and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up connection,
>> what is the definition of 'under-connected'?, see the revoking of the grant to
>> SpaceX for providing such service after they changed the definition of minimum
>> acceptable connectivity and then proactively declared that Starlink will not
>> meet it several years out)
>>
>>>>> If you can reduce distance between satellite and ground station by a
>>>>> factor of 2, all else being equal, theoretically you'd also reduce
>>>>> footprint to a quarter, but that's assuming you don't need to worry about
>>>>> antenna sidelobes. But say we can, and then that gives us a factor of 4 in
>>>>> terms of capacity as long as our user density is the same. It also buys us
>>>>> an extra 6 dB in received signal power and hence an extra 2 bits per
>>>>> symbol. That's another factor of 4 at best if you go from 1 to 3
>>>>> bits/symbol. Larger antennas: Doubling antenna size gives you 3 dB in gain
>>>>> or an extra bit per symbol. So that turns into a game of diminishing
>>>>> margins pretty quickly, too.
>>>>
>>>> add in the ability for multiple satellites to serve a single cell and you
>>>> can get a noticable multiple as well
>>> Not in terms of capacity - but in terms of a better distribution of it.
>>> Already happening - most places can now "see" dozens of Starlink satellites
>>> above the horizon.
>>
>> but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell
>> is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
>>
>>>>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller
>>>>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to
>>>>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had
>>>>> with Dishy.
>>>>
>>>> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an
>>>> emergancy contact capability
>>>
>>> Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much more
>>> than just an emergency contact capability:
>>>
>>> https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/
>>>
>>> (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're going to
>>> get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)
>>
>> yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been pretty vocal
>> that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available
>> bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should always work,
>> voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will happen,
>> but will be slow due to the sharing.
>>
>>>>> That's a far cry from what is needed to get from two million or so
>>>>> customers to supply two billion unconnected or under-connected. For that,
>>>>> we need a factor of 1000.
>>>>
>>>> without knowing what the user density of those under-connected are, it's
>>>> going to be really hard to get concrete arguments.
>>>>
>>>> Spacex is intending to launch ~10x as many satellites as they have now, and
>>>> the full 'v2' satellites are supposed to be 10x the bandwidth of the V1s
>>>> (don't know how they compare to the v2 minis), that's a factor of 100x
>>>> there.
>>>
>>> It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just adding
>>> transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, then even if
>>> the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate into as
>>> much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in terms of
>>> spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't make any
>>> more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting antenna
>>> side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are running close
>>> to spectral capacity in some areas.
>>
>> I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites (~45k
>> satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan to be able
>> to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am speculating
>> about this.
>>
>>> Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is somewhat
>>> similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, we need
>>> that factor of 1000.
>>
>> I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a luxury, not a
>> lifeline. I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than
>> the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and awareness of
>> Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.
>>
>> I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, including in
>> built-up areas.
>>
>>>> Is another 10x in the under-served areas being in less dense areas really
>>>> that hard to believe?
>>>>
>>>> And Starlink will hopefully not be the only service, so it shouldn't have
>>>> to serve everyone.
>>> So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink & Co
>>> over today?
>>
>> not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more
>> optomistic about it than you are.
>>
>>>>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you
>>>>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client.
>>>>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over
>>>>> again through the same pipe, too.
>>>>
>>>> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share
>>>> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead
>>>> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement
>>>> caches.
>>>
>>> Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still focuses
>>> on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.
>>
>> SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
>> high-performance community gateways.
>>
>> I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
>>
>> I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one
>> uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy
>> kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of
>> the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and
>> don't forget the need for power for the system)
>>
>> David Lang_______________________________________________
>> Starlink mailing list
>> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>
>
>
>

Re: [Starlink] starlink business peering

[Dave Taht]

Ooops I meant this to be in response to your last point below...

On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 2:31 AM Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Starlink has described how to peer with them extensively now. It is
> still kind of confusing to me - say I had fios to the business, and a
> AS that met their requirements, I could also somehow dual home that AS
> to my starlink terminal, and it would be a business class service
> required?
>
> https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/peering-with-starlink
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 1:21 AM David Lang via Starlink

> > SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
> > high-performance community gateways.
> >
> > I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
> >
> > I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one
> > uplink and spread it around.

The direct site that they were advertising for 1.2 million or so
looked compact enough to stuff into a a C130 transport plane and drop
onto a providers network anywhere, almost overnight, to provide
10Gbit(?) service. I did not get the dimensions of it, but...

>> We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy
> > kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of
> > the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and
> > don't forget the need for power for the system)

Given that typical usage at ISP peak is about an average of 5Mbit/sec
per household today, mostly driven by 1/6th the users watching
netflix, and starlink achieving download speeds regularly of
300Mbit...

If movie quality is to be compromised to old fashioned 1.5Mbit 720P,
200 households - that can be served by local fiber, wireless bridges,
even 5G, per terminal, over that 70 miles per cell.

For some of the 2B that have nothing today. Early on I had hoped
starlink would enable "a village" to have telephony and local internet
services spread out from there, much like they did in the 90s.
Additional fiber/wireless bridges can expand that island outside the
cell.

It remains unclear to me how many terminals can be stuffed efficiently
together.

> >
> > David Lang_______________________________________________
> > Starlink mailing list
> > Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>
>
>
> --
> https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/2024_predictions/
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos



-- 
https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/2024_predictions/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [Starlink] starlink business peering

[David Lang]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3324 bytes --]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Dave Taht wrote:

> Ooops I meant this to be in response to your last point below...
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 2:31 AM Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Starlink has described how to peer with them extensively now. It is
>> still kind of confusing to me - say I had fios to the business, and a
>> AS that met their requirements, I could also somehow dual home that AS
>> to my starlink terminal, and it would be a business class service
>> required?
>>
>> https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/peering-with-starlink
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 1:21 AM David Lang via Starlink
>
>>> SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
>>> high-performance community gateways.
>>>
>>> I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
>>>
>>> I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one
>>> uplink and spread it around.
>
> The direct site that they were advertising for 1.2 million or so
> looked compact enough to stuff into a a C130 transport plane and drop
> onto a providers network anywhere, almost overnight, to provide
> 10Gbit(?) service. I did not get the dimensions of it, but...

That is overkill for what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the ability to distribute a single connection (possibly a 
consumer dishy, possibly a surviving landline) to a tent city of a few hundred 
(under a thousand) people. Provide some caching of the service, but also provide 
local communications (email, chat, etc)

The Red Cross and others are setup to provide food and shelter, but local 
communications, announcements, etc (including games and other things to keep 
kids out of trouble) seems like the sort of thing that we should be able to 
setup on the cheap.

>>> We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy
>>> kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of
>>> the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and
>>> don't forget the need for power for the system)
>
> Given that typical usage at ISP peak is about an average of 5Mbit/sec
> per household today, mostly driven by 1/6th the users watching
> netflix, and starlink achieving download speeds regularly of
> 300Mbit...
>
> If movie quality is to be compromised to old fashioned 1.5Mbit 720P,
> 200 households - that can be served by local fiber, wireless bridges,
> even 5G, per terminal, over that 70 miles per cell.

you are again mixing services. The direct-to-phone cell service is 7Mb for a 70 
mile cell.

I don't know the dishy cell size, but I think it's substantially smaller than 70 
miles

> For some of the 2B that have nothing today. Early on I had hoped
> starlink would enable "a village" to have telephony and local internet
> services spread out from there, much like they did in the 90s.
> Additional fiber/wireless bridges can expand that island outside the
> cell.

We have seen community service happen in some places, early on SpaceX showed 
some remote Indian villages getting a single dish for the community

too many people (including too many techies) think that providing wifi service 
out from a point is so trivial that anyone can do it.

> It remains unclear to me how many terminals can be stuffed efficiently
> together.

yep

David Lang

Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Ulrich Speidel]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 10854 bytes --]

On 27/02/2024 7:21 pm, David Lang wrote:
> ...snip
> > The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where 
> the
> > scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for 
> it is.
>
> I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed 
> doesn't
> matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options 
> matters
> more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other 
> options (and
> I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly 
> densely
> populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically 
> test it
> and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.
The pinchpoint thus far seems to have been the suburban and lifestyle 
block belts - basically where fibre doesn't reach for whatever reason, 
but where people with the wealth to afford Starlink (or fibre if it were 
offered) live. My bog standard example here in NZ are your IT project 
manager who wants to live on a lifestyle block out bush. They're dime a 
dozen here and Starlink serves them now even when they couldn't 
previously get fibre.
> >>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the 
> endpoints over
> >>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
> >>
> >> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a 
> possible
> >> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be
> >> competitive to fibre
> >>
> >> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
> > Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is 
> how many
> > of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?
>
> what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B 
> under-connected?
My particular "pet case" are Pacific Islanders on islands with 
populations too small / poor to afford a submarine fibre connection. 
These are a somewhat interesting case in that they are just a couple of 
million all up I guess, with numbers shrinking as fibre does get laid. 
Essentially, anyone with 10k plus population and under 1000 km (~600 
miles) to the next cable access point is now a member of the club - 
having a rich nation or large diaspora backing you helps, but beyond 
that it's distance, GDP and politics that govern the game. Starlink can 
(and does now) serve most of the remaining islands, however what makes 
life interesting here is that these islands are often quite densely 
populated, which with growth in Starlink endpoints makes for reduced 
capacity per user. Kiribati for example currently sees around 10 
Starlink kits arriving on every flight into Tarawa in the western part 
of the country (3 flights a week). I'm sure some more arrive by boat 
every few weeks - air freight is expensive (around US$400 per unit). 
Some of these will no doubt go to the outer islands, but Starlink is now 
having a visible presence on roofs there (my PhD student was up there 
and installed one for his family as well as two as part of our project). 
There is no official service yet but regional roaming works well (while 
the power is on, which it hasn't always been lately).
>
> (and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up 
> connection,
> what is the definition of 'under-connected'?, 
That's under-connected in my book.
>
> but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a 
> given cell
> is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
Are we sure here? One (classic) Dishy is served by one satellite at a 
time, but a cell (which can contain multiple DIshys) almost has to be 
serviced by multiple sats to get around obstruction issues (Starlink is 
now quite tolerant of these. Try to put it in a tight spot where it 
can't see the northern sky at your place in LA and tell me whether it 
still connects. If it does, then your cell gets served by multiple sats).
>
> >>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have 
> smaller
> >>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you 
> need to
> >>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what 
> you had
> >>> with Dishy.
> >>
> >> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an
> >> emergancy contact capability
> >
> > Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much 
> more
> > than just an emergency contact capability:
> >
> > https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/ 
> <https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex>
> >
> > (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're 
> going to
> > get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)
>
> yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been 
> pretty vocal
> that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available
> bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should 
> always work,
> voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will 
> happen,
> but will be slow due to the sharing.
Yep, that's what I'd expect also.
>
> > It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just 
> adding
> > transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, 
> then even if
> > the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate 
> into as
> > much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in 
> terms of
> > spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't 
> make any
> > more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting 
> antenna
> > side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are 
> running close
> > to spectral capacity in some areas.
>
> I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites 
> (~45k
> satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan 
> to be able
> to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am 
> speculating
> about this.

A lot of what is meant to go up there is meant to use higher bands, 
which means "more bandwidth" but with caveats relating to obstruction by 
atmospheric phenomena. So that wouldn't quite scale I guess.

There are also other reasons for why you'd want more birds:

  * Path diversity on ISLs to avoid "busy center" issues
  * Having each satellite look after fewer users on the ground allows
    for more bandwidth per user overall due to spatial diversity.
  * Better illumination of the ground.
  * Higher capacity in equatorial areas (where GSO protection takes a
    good chunk out of what's directly overhead).
  * Redundancy.

>
> > Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is 
> somewhat
> > similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, 
> we need
> > that factor of 1000.
>
> I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a 
> luxury, not a
> lifeline. 
I think we're well past that point here. Last year's cyclone was the 
best sales push Elon could have hoped for. You no longer get a discount 
here for living rurally like last year. But you can get deprioritised 
service.
> I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than
> the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and 
> awareness of
> Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.
The slow penetration of modernity into US rural areas seems to be a 
particularly American problem - it's not been an issue here or in the 
Pacific.
>
> I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, 
> including in
> built-up areas.
Interesting.
>
>
> > So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of 
> Starlink & Co
> > over today?
>
> not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more
> optomistic about it than you are.
OK, let's see how this pans out.
>
> >>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity 
> you
> >>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per 
> client.
> >>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over
> >>> again through the same pipe, too.
> >>
> >> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to 
> share
> >> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping 
> overhead
> >> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement
> >> caches.
> >
> > Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still 
> focuses
> > on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.
>
> SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very
> high-performance community gateways.
The latter run under "business" here and the data rates they talk about 
aren't all that appealing given that this is what I see on a roaming 
subscription already. But who knows!
>
> I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.
>
> I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can 
> take one
> uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate 
> dishy
> kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi 
> range of
> the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit 
> (and
> don't forget the need for power for the system)

Yes - that's a lesson that's been learned here.

After last year's cyclone, a lot of local civil defence posts and marae 
here have acquired Starlink kits and generators (NB: marae are compound 
facilities operating as a focal point for indigenous Māori life. Most 
are capable of housing and feeding large groups of people at relatively 
short notice, and they are almost everywhere. Often used for 
conferences, retreats, weddings, funerals, public meetings, and not just 
by Māori).

One of the problems with disaster kits is their power use. Dishy uses 
between 40 and 100W when "idle" with a laptop connected via Ethernet, 
but uses noticeably more power (up to around 150 W on RX and slightly 
less on TX) when receiving significant data volumes, most likely due to 
the complex DSP needed to decode from the phased array.

Half that and you could power it off a car cigarette lighter socket with 
some ease. Would be interesting to hear how the latest generation Dishy 
stacks up there. Oleg - have you measured?

-- 

****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************



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Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

[Nitinder Mohan]

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Hi,

Will quickly jump in for one of the points discussed here.

but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell 
is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
Are we sure here? One (classic) Dishy is served by one satellite at a time, but a cell (which can contain multiple DIshys) almost has to be serviced by multiple sats to get around obstruction issues (Starlink is now quite tolerant of these. Try to put it in a tight spot where it can't see the northern sky at your place in LA and tell me whether it still connects. If it does, then your cell gets served by multiple sats).

A cell is definitely served by more than one sats. In the paper I shared, we did exactly this experiment where we shielded our dish in Edinburgh from the south side so it doesnt receive connectivity from dense 53 deg orbit. The dishy received connection as long as there was a sat in 70 and 97.6 deg orbit in LoS (see fig 4). From our calculations, if your location is covered by all orbital shells of Starlink, you might receive connectivity from 15-20 sats in LoS at any given time.  

Thanks and Regards

Nitinder Mohan
Technical University Munich (TUM)
https://www.nitindermohan.com/

From: Ulrich Speidel via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Reply: Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: 27. February 2024 at 11:16:45
To: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
Cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject:  Re: [Starlink] Comprehensive Measurement Study on Starlink Performance Published

On 27/02/2024 7:21 pm, David Lang wrote:
...snip
> The point though is that these sparsely populated areas aren't where the  
> scalability issue arises. Capacity needs to be where the demand for it is.

I only partially agree with you here. Yes, capacity that isn't needed doesn't  
matter, but I think that the capacity where there aren't other options matters  
more than in the more densly populated areas where there are other options (and  
I say this as a starlink user living in the Los Angeles area, a fairly densely  
populated area) I use Starlink as a backup now, but I do periodically test it  
and verify that it is acceptable for work + other uses.
The pinchpoint thus far seems to have been the suburban and lifestyle block belts - basically where fibre doesn't reach for whatever reason, but where people with the wealth to afford Starlink (or fibre if it were offered) live. My bog standard example here in NZ are your IT project manager who wants to live on a lifestyle block out bush. They're dime a dozen here and Starlink serves them now even when they couldn't previously get fibre.
>>> If you put in fibre today, you know that by upgrading the endpoints over  
>>> time, you can get orders of magnitude of extra bandwidth if needed.
>>  
>> If you can get fibre, you should get fibre (with starlink as a possible  
>> backup). SpaceX has said many times that Starlink is never going to be  
>> competitive to fibre
>>  
>> if you can get fibre, you aren't under-connected.
> Tick. But 2 billion plus can't, or at least not yet. The question is how many  
> of them might Starlink & Co be able to assist in due course?

what information do you have about the distribution of these 2B under-connected?
My particular "pet case" are Pacific Islanders on islands with populations too small / poor to afford a submarine fibre connection. These are a somewhat interesting case in that they are just a couple of million all up I guess, with numbers shrinking as fibre does get laid. Essentially, anyone with 10k plus population and under 1000 km (~600 miles) to the next cable access point is now a member of the club - having a rich nation or large diaspora backing you helps, but beyond that it's distance, GDP and politics that govern the game. Starlink can (and does now) serve most of the remaining islands, however what makes life interesting here is that these islands are often quite densely populated, which with growth in Starlink endpoints makes for reduced capacity per user. Kiribati for example currently sees around 10 Starlink kits arriving on every flight into Tarawa in the western part of the country (3 flights a week). I'm sure some more arrive by boat every few weeks - air freight is expensive (around US$400 per unit). Some of these will no doubt go to the outer islands, but Starlink is now having a visible presence on roofs there (my PhD student was up there and installed one for his family as well as two as part of our project). There is no official service yet but regional roaming works well (while the power is on, which it hasn't always been lately).

(and as someone who just a couple years ago was on a 8m down/1m up connection,  
what is the definition of 'under-connected'?,
That's under-connected in my book.

but as I understand the reverse-engineering of the starlink system, a given cell  
is currently only serviced by one satellite at a time.
Are we sure here? One (classic) Dishy is served by one satellite at a time, but a cell (which can contain multiple DIshys) almost has to be serviced by multiple sats to get around obstruction issues (Starlink is now quite tolerant of these. Try to put it in a tight spot where it can't see the northern sky at your place in LA and tell me whether it still connects. If it does, then your cell gets served by multiple sats).

>>>  But now you want to serve cellphones on the ground which have smaller  
>>> antennas by a factor of I'd say about 16:1 aperture-wise. So you need to  
>>> make your antennas in space 16 times larger just to maintain what you had  
>>> with Dishy.
>>  
>> the cell service is not intended to compete with the Dishy, just be an  
>> emergancy contact capability
>
> Here's how one of the local partner organisation here spins it. Much more  
> than just an emergency contact capability:
>
> https://one.nz/why-choose-us/spacex/
>
> (Judge for yourself whether this instils the impression that you're going to  
> get 5G level service off this. You really need to read the small print!)

yeah, that does seem to imply more than it can offer. Elon has been pretty vocal  
that each cell is something like 70 miles in diameter, and the available  
bandwidth needs to be shared across all users. Text messages should always work,  
voice will probably work, and as the system gets built out, data will happen,  
but will be slow due to the sharing.
Yep, that's what I'd expect also.

> It's not that easy. Adding satellites in the first instance is just adding  
> transmitters, and unless you have spectrum to accommodate these, then even if  
> the satellites' on-board bandwidth is higher, it doesn't translate into as  
> much extra capacity. Spectrum comes in terms of extra Hertz, and in terms of  
> spatial beam separation. The former is limited in that they don't make any  
> more of it, and the latter is a matter of antenna size and getting antenna  
> side lobes sufficiently far down. And we know that SpaceX are running close  
> to spectral capacity in some areas.

I am assuming that the fact that they have planned for 10x satellites (~45k  
satellites up from the ~5k they have now) means that they have a plan to be able  
to use that many efficiently. I have no inside knowlege, so I am speculating  
about this.
A lot of what is meant to go up there is meant to use higher bands, which means "more bandwidth" but with caveats relating to obstruction by atmospheric phenomena. So that wouldn't quite scale I guess.

There are also other reasons for why you'd want more birds: 

Path diversity on ISLs to avoid "busy center" issues
Having each satellite look after fewer users on the ground allows for more bandwidth per user overall due to spatial diversity.
Better illumination of the ground.
Higher capacity in equatorial areas (where GSO protection takes a good chunk out of what's directly overhead).
Redundancy.

> Assuming that the spatial distribution of the under-connected is somewhat  
> similar to Starlink's current customer base in terms of densities, we need  
> that factor of 1000.

I think there are a lot of early adopters for who Starlink is a luxury, not a  
lifeline.
I think we're well past that point here. Last year's cyclone was the best sales push Elon could have hoped for. You no longer get a discount here for living rurally like last year. But you can get deprioritised service.
I think the under-connected are going to be in more sparse areas than  
the early adopters. I have friends and family in rural areas, and awareness of  
Starlink is only slowly penetrating there.
The slow penetration of modernity into US rural areas seems to be a particularly American problem - it's not been an issue here or in the Pacific.

I'm seeing increased use for mobile applications here in the US, including in  
built-up areas.
Interesting.


> So which factor in terms of capacity growth should we expect of Starlink & Co  
> over today?

not enough information. I agree it's something to watch, I'm just more  
optomistic about it than you are.
OK, let's see how this pans out.

>>> And then you need to provision some to compete with extra capacity you  
>>> wanted, and then some to cope with general growth in demand per client.  
>>> And then you have to transmit that same viral cat video over and over  
>>> again through the same pipe, too.
>>  
>> True, although if you can setup a community gateway of some sort to share  
>> one satellite connection, you gain efficiency (less housekeeping overhead  
>> or unused upload timeslots), and have a place that you can implement  
>> caches.
>
> Indeed. Or if you provide a feed to a local ISP. But Starlink still focuses  
> on direct to site, as does every other LEO provider FAIK.

SpaceX is diversifying thier offerings, including boats, planes, and very  
high-performance community gateways.
The latter run under "business" here and the data rates they talk about aren't all that appealing given that this is what I see on a roaming subscription already. But who knows!

I'd love to see more tech folks supporting this sort of thing.

I would especially like to see us put together disaster kits that can take one  
uplink and spread it around. We've seen SpaceX being willing to donate dishy  
kits, but being able to spread the hotspot island out from direct wifi range of  
the dishy to be able to cover a larger area would be worth quite a bit (and  
don't forget the need for power for the system)
Yes - that's a lesson that's been learned here.

After last year's cyclone, a lot of local civil defence posts and marae here have acquired Starlink kits and generators (NB: marae are compound facilities operating as a focal point for indigenous Māori life. Most are capable of housing and feeding large groups of people at relatively short notice, and they are almost everywhere. Often used for conferences, retreats, weddings, funerals, public meetings, and not just by Māori).

One of the problems with disaster kits is their power use. Dishy uses between 40 and 100W when "idle" with a laptop connected via Ethernet, but uses noticeably more power (up to around 150 W on RX and slightly less on TX) when receiving significant data volumes, most likely due to the complex DSP needed to decode from the phased array.

Half that and you could power it off a car cigarette lighter socket with some ease. Would be interesting to hear how the latest generation Dishy stacks up there. Oleg - have you measured?

--
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************



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