As a practical matter how does this help? You need to have base stations/dishes, right? Can they be beefy ones that can pump out gigabytes that would be capable of backfilling the load? Or would it need to be multiple in parallel? Wouldn't that bandwidth be constrained by the number of visible satellites in the constellation? I wonder if they've ever even tested it with feeding into an internet facing router. Could tables on the satellites explode?
Mike
Anyone with a dish and power can connect to the Internet. That's it.
If a dish owner chooses to allow too many people to share their uplink,
then they will run into capacity problems - the Starlink systems are
designed more for households than towns.
There are beefy uplinks, but they are Starlink's, not consumer-owned.
Without them, Starlink would be an isolated network.
Here in rural Oz I know quite a few people who are early adopters of
Starlink and they have been very happy with it. Of course, as the
network starts supporting millions instead of thousands, that may
change. And I'm guessing the number of beefy uplinks will increase,
though they would I imagine be placed in stable geopolitical areas.
Regards, K.
If there aren't fixed Internet-connected earth stations line-of-sight to the satellite that's serving the remote terminal, Starlink will relay satellite-to-satellite until a path to an Internet-connected earth station is in reach.
From the linked article:
"Musk has previously stressed Starlink’s flexibility of Starlink in providing internet service. In September, Musk talked about how the company would use links between the satellites to create a network that could provide service even in countries that prohibit SpaceX from installing ground infrastructure for distribution.
As for government regulators who want to block Starlink from using that capability, Musk had a simple answer.
“They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said."
That was my intuition. It might help strategic locations but won't be a panacea. And of course this could be the mother of all success disasters were there to be enough dishes.
Mike
As of right now >90% of the starlink satellites in orbit function in what we would call a bent pipe topology, where a moving LEO satellite at any given moment in time needs to be simultaneously in view of a starlink-run earth station and the CPE.
They have been launching satellites with sat-to-sat laser links but such architecture is by no means fully operational yet. It does appear to be the intended architecture in the long term, to enable several hops of satellite in between a CPE and a starlink-run earth station.
My best theory would be that this is using existing starlink earth stations in Slovakia or Poland. They may have accelerated the commissioning of some of the newest ones.
Curious, will that be with starlink ASN then ?
That throw geo detection via IP out right away.
From a quick google search it seems to be 14593.
From a quick google search it seems to be 14593.
Curious, will that be with starlink ASN then ?
That throw geo detection via IP out right away.
One way to avoid geo-detection of course is to run a vpn.
Source specific routing can be used to "export" ipv6 blocks from
anywhere to anywhere.
Friends who have Starlink terminals in Europe (cz) go out through AS36492.
I think they were all that way, but I believe traffic is moving over to 14593.
I’ve seen people post on their social media that their routing changed.
Starlink uses Google as their ground provider - Google invested $1bn into Starlink so it’s no wonder.
Phin
Yes, most starlink is via AS36492. They also have AS27277, though I’m not sure if that’s in active use for consumer traffic.
So they’re going to offer the service to anyone in a denied area for free somehow? How do you send someone a bill or how do they pay it if you can’t do business in the country?
This is more of a brand image / marketing stunt for Starlink. A pretty ingenious way to market which will heavily pay off long term. To them, this is cheap for how much attention it’s getting them.
Phin
Starlink however forgets that Russia does have anti satellite weapons and they probably will not hesitate to use them which will make low earth orbit a very dangerous place when Russia starts blowing up the Starlink birds. I applaud the humanitarian aspect of providing Starlink service, unfortunately there are geopolitical realities like access to space which is likely to be negatively impacted if and when Russia starts shooting down these birds. Fortunately if they start shooting down the birds the debris will burn up in a year or so unlike geosync orbit where it would stay forever.
Kinda like sending Captain Kirk on a space launch. Amazing marketing!
Starlink however forgets that Russia does have anti satellite weapons and they probably will not hesitate to use them which will make low earth orbit a very dangerous place when Russia starts blowing up the Starlink birds. I applaud the humanitarian aspect of providing Starlink service, unfortunately there are geopolitical realities like access to space which is likely to be negatively impacted if and when Russia starts shooting down these birds. Fortunately if they start shooting down the birds the debris will burn up in a year or so unlike geosync orbit where it would stay forever.
Russia is not going to be using up it’s anti-sat weapons to take down commercial internet birds. Let’s use a little common sense here.
I think you are significantly overestimating the quality, quantity and will of the Russians to do such a thing as shoot down another countries satellites. In case it wasn’t clear from the preceding week there is a significant difference between the image of conventional weapon strength the Russian military has been portraying over the last 20 years and the reality of the situation. Swatting down hundreds of satellites just isn’t a thing, even the US military who have access to hundreds of SM3/SM6/THAAD vehicles would struggle to do such a thing. The Russian military would struggle to knock down a dozen I would suggest and the retaliation would be significant for such a blatant attack on a NATO countries assets.