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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#361

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…

If i understand correctly the antenna tracks a specific satellite as it transit above it. So how does it handle the switch from that satellite to the next one without losing signal?

Seems like once its found the optimal pointing it stays there, the rest is done with phased array steering, so very rapid tracking / switching possible.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned. heh, my assumption when I hear that people who know what they're doing are involved is the opposite ;) Thank you for the detailed report! I'm very excited for the tech, especially once the lasers are up and it doesn't rely on the base station (i.e. I can take my uplink on a road trip)

Lol, the fact that they just went with IPv4 supports the theory that they know what they're doing. I've read multiple tutorials on IPv6 and it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works in my head. For some context, I've personally written an Ethernet IPv4 network stack with DHCP from scratch. I also worked on Ethernet switch firmware, coincidentally for SpaceX...

I guess I don't have as much low level experience as you do, but in my eyes IPv6 is literally just IPv4 with more bits. Due to the increased number of possible addresses, IPv6 is used with some different (better) concepts than IPv4. For example having (very likely) unique local networks (ULAs) is amazing when you happen to merge previously independent networks together or do some VPN stuff. You pretty much never have to calculate subnets because you'll likely never run out of addresses. And even if you somehow manage to do the impossible and fill up a /48 ULA (at which point you would have died from NATing billions of entire IPv4 address spaces with multiple layers to somehow make it all one network on IPv4), it takes just two seconds to generate a new one.

Also getting an entire public prefix assigned instead of just a single address is amazing too. On my public servers I let my ssh service listen on a randomly generated static IPv6 address from my prefix, which is not used for anything else. On that same machine I can have dozens of other public services on their own IP each (they can even all run on the same port because they're using different addresses), and when someone then decides to scan the IP of my website for interesting ports, they won't find anything.

To be honest, if someone doesn't understand IPv6, I doubt they really understand IPv4 either. Many issues with IPv6 today come from the fact that everyone and everything is so used to V4 concepts, that most products focus on IPv4 first and then half-ass IPv6 support (if they implement it at all).

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#363
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, the fact that they just went with IPv4 supports the theory that they know what they're doing. I've read multiple tutorials on IPv6 and it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works in my head. For some context, I've personally written an Ethernet IPv4 network stack with DHCP from scratch. I also worked on Ethernet switch firmware, coincidentally for SpaceX...

IPv6 really isn't that complicated compared to CGNAT! Of course, today IPv6 only can't be considered full internet access, so providers usually need both – and given that CGNAT gets consumers 99% of what they want/are willing to pay for, providers sometimes can't be bothered to also implement IPv6. I used to have GCNAT + IPv6 on my provider, but the v6 part of their CPE was worse than useless – no option to open port…

It can’t? I at one point messed up my firewall rules and didn’t notice that IPv4 wasn’t accessible for a few days. Nobody complained. I eventually noticed something was amiss and fixed it but really most places seems to be running dual stack. I am starting to run some IPV6 only services.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that is fascinating to me about really all of Musk's businesses - they all seem to be in some way misrepresenting themselves to the general public. And they all actually rely on insights into how governments have to spend at an enormous scale. And all of them make things that are of extreme strategic importance on a global scale. Like I'm not one for conspiracy bullshit, but there must be a deeper s…

I mean, customers from all over the world using an USA ISP for their internet access, which can be tapped easily to gather mass surveillance data is a very valid reason to be paranoid :)

This is a scenario for which the tin-foil hat was born.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#365
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia. A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted. There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at…

Isn’t the current latency between Sydney and Singapore 15ms or less by now? No one who is latency sensitive should be using Starlink unless they are in some incredibly remote location. (And they should move if they are 150ms is a cosmic age in low latency trading)

Sydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#366
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If either your ISP exposes that ability or if you maintain multiple outbound connections, then yes. But I don't think this is commonly implemented today, however. You would probably have to configure your own routing table to direct traffic for each application through the appropriate link, but that's completely doable as long as you can write rules to distinguish the packets (for example based on destination).

Yes I can imagine using iptables to work but it was my understanding that this would only be able to determine the next hop and I couldn’t get it to force the decision higher up the chain. This would mean that every party along the chain has to play ball. I can imagine that it would be beneficial for the internet experience if we could segregate low latency traffic (human/hft) traffic from hulk traffic such as video.…

If you want it to be done externally without setting up a routing table then the next best option would be some kind of traffic tagging to indicate what you want to go over which line. That would start looking like a network with multiple VLAN:s.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#368

I'm not supporting this project due to space pollution and hope others will do the same. If starlink is gonna be a success they will start more of this insane projects. let's stop it here.

There is no way that in 100 years there would not be hundreds of thousands of satellites in earth orbit, with or without starlink

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, the fact that they just went with IPv4 supports the theory that they know what they're doing. I've read multiple tutorials on IPv6 and it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works in my head. For some context, I've personally written an Ethernet IPv4 network stack with DHCP from scratch. I also worked on Ethernet switch firmware, coincidentally for SpaceX...

Going through the trouble of implementing CGNAT and skipping IPv6 seems like a partially degraded service for the end user though. It's becoming common practice for ISPs to slap all the users between two layers of NAT and calling it a day. You can't run essentially anything on your network (not even an SSH server) without having to have a server on standby and reverse tunnels. I know there are not enough IPv4s but at…

Honestly, it's not that complicated to set up a L2TP or VPN tunnel to a server with routable inbound IP traffic.

Most people who would know how to set up port forwarding could probably set it up. I think even some routers support it built in now.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#370
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.

Why couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice? Is it because ISLs will require more powerful lasers because the light is focused through a lens instead of guided through a fiber?

High end fibre routers use multi-spectral bandwith, effectively allowing for multiple data streams to be transmitted on one fibre cable, and re-broken out at the other end. This significantly increases bandwidth.

I doubt the laser links support this, and I wonder if any could, when in a non-encapsulated environment. EG, spectral pollution from sunlight/etc.

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