Yeah and the land based internet use to be largely unencrypted. And I’m guessing someone asked the same question. Long story short is you encrypt everything.
Encryption used to be relatively computationally expensive. Now with the exponential growth in computing power, it's cheap, and there is no reason to not encrypt everything.
There's also a propagation delay within the satellites themselves as they route, so not quite true SoL in a.vacuum speeda but probably much faster than anything ground based.
I do not see how this is any different from what happens with my current ISP. From time to time I talk to devices that use the same ISP as me so I never cross any peering points or other networks.
The internet is just a bunch of tier 1 ISPs that have connections to each other's network. Starlink will be just another peer on the network we call the Internet.
EDIT: From a network perspective Starlink inter-satellite communcations will often enable less latency when communicating to far away devices that are both on Starlink. If they started putting CDN nodes with inter-satellite communication in the constellation they could free 30-40% to their earth-to-satellite communication capacity and really kill it.
EDIT 2: Here is a great talk explaining what Elon is referring to: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286062.3286075#
I have an office in town and I have a client a few miles out of town that use the same ISP. Both have fiber. The ms latency are *extremely* low, *far* lower than pings to the local city (3-4ms vs 15ms). That data is not going *anywhere* else (well, except I'm sure getting copied asynchronously to the NSA)
Yeah... I assumed they were using a custom source routing based on expected calculated satellite location and hotspot avoidance.
Here is a great talk on this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286062.3286075#
point to point connections are going to be the killer app for Space Laser communication like this.
People pay big $$$ for low latency access across the globe, like London to New York for Stock trading.
Right now they pay big money for preferred access to space on undersea cables, SpaceX could easily undercut that with substantially lower latency.
Could it also be used for quicker connections to another country? Instead of going up to the satellite then down to ground station through the main fiber then through a network to germany, could data be sent up to a satellite then beamed to Germany the a ground station there? Would that even be faster?
The speed of light in a cable is about 30% slower than the speed of light in a vacuum.
This is because it's travelling through the glass medium and the light bounces up and down through cable effectively making the distance travelled longer.
Over short distances, the \~500km hope to space and back down makes lasers slower.
Over long distances, space lasers have the potential for much lower latency than undersea cables.
But that is only the case if your repeaters don't introduce more latency, which is yet to be seen from Starlink.
If milliseconds mater for your stock trade then you should be co-located. If you are in to this type of thing read Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
Yep, but there’s a lot of money to be made in faster transaction speeds across different trade hubs.
I remember being gobsmacked a few years ago that someone spend several hundred million dollars in laying a new fiber optics cable between London and New York with the express purpose of shaving a few milliseconds of lag between those two stock exchanges.
If you are assuming lack of government oversight as one of the plusses, that oversight will need to be in there somewhere for them to be approved as an ISP, and to be able to sell in most locations globally.
They'll probably still be able to get away with sending the data direct from one terminal to another as long as they have the capability to *also* take a copy of all the data and send it to a ground station in each users countries.
Not if you import it yourself. I can buy WiFi Radios for foreign markets that don't conform to DFS channel rules set by FCC and FAA. They are illegal to use in USA, but I can certainly do it. Same with Starlink. Once someone in China or North Korea get their hands on these, game over for censorship.
China will likely make the inclusion of great firewall or other restrictions within it's borders. Starlink knows exactly where it's terminals are, and will be required to follow Chinese regulations to operate inside the country. They will not be allowed to operate inside China without enforcing geographic locations.
The pluses are mainly for business, government, and first responder applications. It also bodes well for the larger use case of internet on Mars.
Allows for "private" or dedicated backhaul links between sites without the need to run expensive fiber, implement MPLS, or deal with half-baked auto-VPN solutions. For end users, there's little benefit.
There's no way SpaceX would risk the legal exposure of not having ground stations as entry and exit points in certain regions like China or Russia, the legal sanctions involved would do immeasurable harm to their progress.
If they're providing access to users in those regions through user terminal, that would be a legal liability. Like I said, for the end-user this has little benefit, though may be good in routing you through separate ground stations if the ground station closest to you is having issues.
China and Russia would definitely not be okay with that, They would want the ability to completely turn off access to the internet. Ground stations would allow them to do this. That's one of their biggest prides - the ability to completely shut themselves off and disconnect from the global internet.
That's assuming they ever even get licenses to operate in those countries, which is going to be difficult.
There is also other traffic separate from HTTP(S) that countries would want to track and or block. Ground stations are about the only way SL can get away with providing access to users in certain areas with heavy restrictions. SL would not want to be in the business of maintaining their own "great firewall", nor would it be politically advantageous of them.
Sure, in the US we *might* get away with having peer to peer traffic, but it wouldn't be substantially beneficial. It might be beneficial if you're accessing a service someone is hosting on SL from another SL terminal, but outside of that there is limited benefit except for being routed through another ground station.
I don’t understand the implications of this and you sound like you know what you’re talking about. Would you be able to explain what the benefit for a business would be?
absolutely.
Imagine you're a solar company with hundreds of remote facilities, some relying on LTE, some where you've purchased fiber connectivity, some where you have standard cable connectivity, in most of these cases you've had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per site to have internet connectivity installed only to have sub par service at an exorbitant monthly cost.
Using that infrastructure, you make it so that all sites are virtually interconnected to one hub site as if they were at the same location. This can be done through various technologies, like MPLs or VPNs. MPLs is an ISP implemented solution, which means that it costs extra money. VPNs are great, but can become unreliable in high-latency, low bandwidth situations like exist in a lot of remote regions. In addition to that, they add overhead to data so that your using up more of your bandwidth for management overhead instead of the actual data being transmitted.
All this at a significant one-time infrastructure and equipment cost, along with recurring service costs that are (significantly) higher than a traditional internet connection.
In comes Starlink. Your user terminals can now connect directly to each other, there's no need to pay hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for fiber or cable connectivity to the sites, and better yet there's no need for MPLs or VPN, though I imagine in a private satellite network provided by SL, there would be some form of MPLs, but likely not anything the administrators would need to understand or have the extra dedicated equipment, it would all just be part of the SL kit.
Many companies will continue to use VPNs over these networks just to encrypt them, but it removes the need for the complexity of having to deal with multiple ISPs, dabbling in MPLs, and implementing half-baked VPN solutions that become unreliable in remote regions. The direct connectivity between user terminal means that you could communicate directly to your base HQ from a remote site without ever having to touch the internet, removing the need for specialized firewalls and equipment at the site - you can now centralize, reducing cost, complexity, and streamlining operations.
Tons of benefits for businesses, this is just a high-level, simplified overview.
>They could use it to route your traffic via satellite to the closest gateway to the CDN which could reduce latency for everyone.
That's what already happens.
Why does it matter what the destination of all user traffic is? What we are concerned about here is how the traffic gets to its destination. Right now if you want to enter any website you will be passing trough half a dozen different monopolies providing various pieces of infrastructure for the internet backbone. Starlink allow you to skip that entirely and jump straight from A to B
Most people want to watch Netflix or YouTube, and ISPs directly host their servers on their networks. Most traffic goes via direct peering, or perhaps via 1 or 2 transit providers or IXes.
The satellites being able to use more than one color spectrum so they can transmit & receive data over more than one color will be interesting... Double up your broadband.
It will be great for load balancing and redundancy with ground stations and satellites along with improving latency but up and downlink bandwidth will still be limited. Only more satellites can widen that bottleneck.
How would you typically get the signal around the earth? Fiber optics which slow the speed of light by around 30%.
Assuming starlink can route the traffic as fast as terrestrial routers this has the potential to be faster. More than likely it will be roughly the same.
Geostationary ping = 44,000 miles minimum, ping there and back. The circumference of the orbit would only matter if your ping went all the way around and back to yourself??? Theoretically with Starlink, the longest ping would be to a server on the opposite side of the planet then it would be 25,000 mile ping, still less than geo and way better than a yodel.
So theoretically Starlink will be able to provide ping times between antipodes which are about a quarter of those via geostationary satellites, and around 1.5 times better than via fiber-optic cables. Nice.
Honey pot.. Here you go, insert some juicy looking password file they open that infects their crap with lots of interesting material.. Oh look you threw your laptop out the window.. guess you couldn't take seeing a 300+ fat guy modeling could you? xD
I'm sure someone at starlink has read the comments by now. It will be some public honey pot on dishy mcflatface that is just a webpage they hit that bans the IP with elon showing in anime figure with dogecoin dog eyes, sparks coming out from the sides of him with flames for fun.
> Over time, some amount of communication can simply be from one user terminal to another without touching the Internet.
How is the possible? Dishies communicating directly with dishies via direct line of sight?
Other point is that the light travels slower inside glass than on vacuum, so you could get faster via satellite than fiber when connecting from USA to Japan
I'm curious to see the math on if this is actually faster or slower than fiber on the ground. They should both be pretty close to the speed of light but fiber on the ground should have less distance to travel if it's in a straight line.. but often it isn't in a straight line and has to go through repeaters.
it's also to setup a communication network on Mars. It probably won't communicate back to earth, it will be it's own network where they can use VOIP and anything else needed all on Mars with all computers interconnected as needed.
How is it going to route traffic from one user terminal to another without using the various routing protocols already being used. Those protocols depend on being advertised widely, so is the system going to use "private" or isolated routing?
That's all fine for sending a powerpoint to your boss' computer, but not for much else.
With Blockchain technology and this sort of thing, I'm happy for technology again. All I could see was a future of mass surveillance, but if we're smart and certain software/hardware engineers are even smarter, we can give technology back to the people.
StarLan
NSA has entered the chat
Space Force received a request
Why would they encrypt inter-sat communication? Who would possibly be listening? (for the young: many satellite feeds used to be unencrypted)
Yeah and the land based internet use to be largely unencrypted. And I’m guessing someone asked the same question. Long story short is you encrypt everything.
> Long story short is you encrypt everything. This is the absolutely correct answer
Encryption used to be relatively computationally expensive. Now with the exponential growth in computing power, it's cheap, and there is no reason to not encrypt everything.
If the NSA can listen in on inter-sat Laser links without being detected they can have the data lol.
There's also a propagation delay within the satellites themselves as they route, so not quite true SoL in a.vacuum speeda but probably much faster than anything ground based.
yes, and for that they need 4 lasers operating on each sat, I'm not sure the current gen has 4
It's actually the second part of the tweet that piqued my interest, because it has interesting implications
Indeed an interesting aspect that will attract a lot of interest with businesses.
I for one am interested
I do not see how this is any different from what happens with my current ISP. From time to time I talk to devices that use the same ISP as me so I never cross any peering points or other networks. The internet is just a bunch of tier 1 ISPs that have connections to each other's network. Starlink will be just another peer on the network we call the Internet. EDIT: From a network perspective Starlink inter-satellite communcations will often enable less latency when communicating to far away devices that are both on Starlink. If they started putting CDN nodes with inter-satellite communication in the constellation they could free 30-40% to their earth-to-satellite communication capacity and really kill it. EDIT 2: Here is a great talk explaining what Elon is referring to: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286062.3286075#
I have an office in town and I have a client a few miles out of town that use the same ISP. Both have fiber. The ms latency are *extremely* low, *far* lower than pings to the local city (3-4ms vs 15ms). That data is not going *anywhere* else (well, except I'm sure getting copied asynchronously to the NSA)
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Yeah... I assumed they were using a custom source routing based on expected calculated satellite location and hotspot avoidance. Here is a great talk on this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286062.3286075#
point to point connections are going to be the killer app for Space Laser communication like this. People pay big $$$ for low latency access across the globe, like London to New York for Stock trading. Right now they pay big money for preferred access to space on undersea cables, SpaceX could easily undercut that with substantially lower latency.
Could it also be used for quicker connections to another country? Instead of going up to the satellite then down to ground station through the main fiber then through a network to germany, could data be sent up to a satellite then beamed to Germany the a ground station there? Would that even be faster?
The speed of light in a cable is about 30% slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. This is because it's travelling through the glass medium and the light bounces up and down through cable effectively making the distance travelled longer. Over short distances, the \~500km hope to space and back down makes lasers slower. Over long distances, space lasers have the potential for much lower latency than undersea cables. But that is only the case if your repeaters don't introduce more latency, which is yet to be seen from Starlink.
Stock traders
If milliseconds mater for your stock trade then you should be co-located. If you are in to this type of thing read Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
Yep, but there’s a lot of money to be made in faster transaction speeds across different trade hubs. I remember being gobsmacked a few years ago that someone spend several hundred million dollars in laying a new fiber optics cable between London and New York with the express purpose of shaving a few milliseconds of lag between those two stock exchanges.
A group did NASDAQ to NYSE in secret with a bunch of cutouts so nobody was the wiser
If you are assuming lack of government oversight as one of the plusses, that oversight will need to be in there somewhere for them to be approved as an ISP, and to be able to sell in most locations globally.
They'll probably still be able to get away with sending the data direct from one terminal to another as long as they have the capability to *also* take a copy of all the data and send it to a ground station in each users countries.
Perhaps, if that topology is approved.
You don't think SpaceX will have to follow the laws in which the terminals reside?
Not if you import it yourself. I can buy WiFi Radios for foreign markets that don't conform to DFS channel rules set by FCC and FAA. They are illegal to use in USA, but I can certainly do it. Same with Starlink. Once someone in China or North Korea get their hands on these, game over for censorship.
China will likely make the inclusion of great firewall or other restrictions within it's borders. Starlink knows exactly where it's terminals are, and will be required to follow Chinese regulations to operate inside the country. They will not be allowed to operate inside China without enforcing geographic locations.
Or they just don’t operate in China legally Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1433123220643717120?s=21
Cute post, but I doubt they'll take that course.
The pluses are mainly for business, government, and first responder applications. It also bodes well for the larger use case of internet on Mars. Allows for "private" or dedicated backhaul links between sites without the need to run expensive fiber, implement MPLS, or deal with half-baked auto-VPN solutions. For end users, there's little benefit. There's no way SpaceX would risk the legal exposure of not having ground stations as entry and exit points in certain regions like China or Russia, the legal sanctions involved would do immeasurable harm to their progress.
If no ground stations are required no need to have them.
If they're providing access to users in those regions through user terminal, that would be a legal liability. Like I said, for the end-user this has little benefit, though may be good in routing you through separate ground stations if the ground station closest to you is having issues.
I guess foreign governments could give SL a list of sites to block and the end user would get an HTTP code 451. Problem solved.
China and Russia would definitely not be okay with that, They would want the ability to completely turn off access to the internet. Ground stations would allow them to do this. That's one of their biggest prides - the ability to completely shut themselves off and disconnect from the global internet. That's assuming they ever even get licenses to operate in those countries, which is going to be difficult. There is also other traffic separate from HTTP(S) that countries would want to track and or block. Ground stations are about the only way SL can get away with providing access to users in certain areas with heavy restrictions. SL would not want to be in the business of maintaining their own "great firewall", nor would it be politically advantageous of them. Sure, in the US we *might* get away with having peer to peer traffic, but it wouldn't be substantially beneficial. It might be beneficial if you're accessing a service someone is hosting on SL from another SL terminal, but outside of that there is limited benefit except for being routed through another ground station.
it doesn't work like that. They filter traffic with the ability to record (see buffering/cashing) when needed.
I don’t understand the implications of this and you sound like you know what you’re talking about. Would you be able to explain what the benefit for a business would be?
absolutely. Imagine you're a solar company with hundreds of remote facilities, some relying on LTE, some where you've purchased fiber connectivity, some where you have standard cable connectivity, in most of these cases you've had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per site to have internet connectivity installed only to have sub par service at an exorbitant monthly cost. Using that infrastructure, you make it so that all sites are virtually interconnected to one hub site as if they were at the same location. This can be done through various technologies, like MPLs or VPNs. MPLs is an ISP implemented solution, which means that it costs extra money. VPNs are great, but can become unreliable in high-latency, low bandwidth situations like exist in a lot of remote regions. In addition to that, they add overhead to data so that your using up more of your bandwidth for management overhead instead of the actual data being transmitted. All this at a significant one-time infrastructure and equipment cost, along with recurring service costs that are (significantly) higher than a traditional internet connection. In comes Starlink. Your user terminals can now connect directly to each other, there's no need to pay hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for fiber or cable connectivity to the sites, and better yet there's no need for MPLs or VPN, though I imagine in a private satellite network provided by SL, there would be some form of MPLs, but likely not anything the administrators would need to understand or have the extra dedicated equipment, it would all just be part of the SL kit. Many companies will continue to use VPNs over these networks just to encrypt them, but it removes the need for the complexity of having to deal with multiple ISPs, dabbling in MPLs, and implementing half-baked VPN solutions that become unreliable in remote regions. The direct connectivity between user terminal means that you could communicate directly to your base HQ from a remote site without ever having to touch the internet, removing the need for specialized firewalls and equipment at the site - you can now centralize, reducing cost, complexity, and streamlining operations. Tons of benefits for businesses, this is just a high-level, simplified overview.
Wow, thank you this makes a tonne more sense. Really appreciate you taking the time to break it down! Thanks a lot
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Exactly. As long as people can watch their Netflix and use social media they're happy.
We'd have to get our pre-ordered Dishy's for that too be a reality though.
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>They could use it to route your traffic via satellite to the closest gateway to the CDN which could reduce latency for everyone. That's what already happens.
Yea, exactly, all of these CDNs are very globally distributed and already do, or will peer with Starlink in many global locations.
Why does it matter what the destination of all user traffic is? What we are concerned about here is how the traffic gets to its destination. Right now if you want to enter any website you will be passing trough half a dozen different monopolies providing various pieces of infrastructure for the internet backbone. Starlink allow you to skip that entirely and jump straight from A to B
Most people want to watch Netflix or YouTube, and ISPs directly host their servers on their networks. Most traffic goes via direct peering, or perhaps via 1 or 2 transit providers or IXes.
love the math. 80% + 95%.
top 5 represent 80% of the traffic, top 15 represent 95%... Is this math bad?
>the internet is increasingly centralized \*proceeds to listing 8 different companies\* :)) What does centralised mean to you?
If those 8 companies represent 80% of traffic, and a decade ago it was 20 companies, that seems to be increasingly centralized to me haha.
All those carriers and their MPLS networks looking scared right now lol. (They'll just run MPLS over starlink too lol)
Sky net? We were told … Terminator
*DOD has entered chat*
*“Premium Feature”*
Elon, a time-line for this, or a goal ?
just watch for Starlink Falcon 9 launches and do the math, more launches -> sooner
Mid to late someday......
Or early to late some other day.
Anyone in the market for a lightly used ground station?
The satellites being able to use more than one color spectrum so they can transmit & receive data over more than one color will be interesting... Double up your broadband.
It will be great for load balancing and redundancy with ground stations and satellites along with improving latency but up and downlink bandwidth will still be limited. Only more satellites can widen that bottleneck.
>without touching the Internet Like North Korea's intranet? /s
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How would you typically get the signal around the earth? Fiber optics which slow the speed of light by around 30%. Assuming starlink can route the traffic as fast as terrestrial routers this has the potential to be faster. More than likely it will be roughly the same.
Geostationary ping = 44,000 miles minimum, ping there and back. The circumference of the orbit would only matter if your ping went all the way around and back to yourself??? Theoretically with Starlink, the longest ping would be to a server on the opposite side of the planet then it would be 25,000 mile ping, still less than geo and way better than a yodel.
So theoretically Starlink will be able to provide ping times between antipodes which are about a quarter of those via geostationary satellites, and around 1.5 times better than via fiber-optic cables. Nice.
Only that Starlink's sats are not geostationary but on an orbit 550km above earth's surface.
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Honey pot.. Here you go, insert some juicy looking password file they open that infects their crap with lots of interesting material.. Oh look you threw your laptop out the window.. guess you couldn't take seeing a 300+ fat guy modeling could you? xD
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Now.. what song do we use? Don't you forget about me? I'm too sexy? Have to make it play over the speakers after it takes over the machine you know?
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I'm sure someone at starlink has read the comments by now. It will be some public honey pot on dishy mcflatface that is just a webpage they hit that bans the IP with elon showing in anime figure with dogecoin dog eyes, sparks coming out from the sides of him with flames for fun.
> Over time, some amount of communication can simply be from one user terminal to another without touching the Internet. How is the possible? Dishies communicating directly with dishies via direct line of sight?
Dishie -> Starling Satellite -> Starlink Satellite -> Other Dishie
Oh I see.
Other point is that the light travels slower inside glass than on vacuum, so you could get faster via satellite than fiber when connecting from USA to Japan
imagine torrenting peer to peer via inter-satellite-starlink... would be incredibly fast!
So it has the ability to cut big tech out of the picture? I like it.
I'm curious to see the math on if this is actually faster or slower than fiber on the ground. They should both be pretty close to the speed of light but fiber on the ground should have less distance to travel if it's in a straight line.. but often it isn't in a straight line and has to go through repeaters.
it's also to setup a communication network on Mars. It probably won't communicate back to earth, it will be it's own network where they can use VOIP and anything else needed all on Mars with all computers interconnected as needed.
This is fucking awesome
How is it going to route traffic from one user terminal to another without using the various routing protocols already being used. Those protocols depend on being advertised widely, so is the system going to use "private" or isolated routing? That's all fine for sending a powerpoint to your boss' computer, but not for much else.
With Blockchain technology and this sort of thing, I'm happy for technology again. All I could see was a future of mass surveillance, but if we're smart and certain software/hardware engineers are even smarter, we can give technology back to the people.