[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How does Starlink work for IP address/ASN in...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: How does Starlink work for IP address/ASN internationally?
I was curious how Starlink would work when connected in
international locations? Would it show a US IP address? Would it
show a Starlink ISP ASN? For comparision - cell phone tethering
plans, you can be "anywhere" in the world, but the roaming telcom
provider will (lack of a better word) "tunnel" your connection to
your local telcom so you could be in China, France, UK but you
would have the country of origin IP address/telcom provider ASN?
E.g. T-Mobile from USA, but in Europe would show that you're either
in California or Kansas.
Author : rootsudo
Score : 63 points
Date : 2023-10-07 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
| hughes wrote:
| Why do you ask? Planning something?
| redbell wrote:
| > but the roaming telcom provider will "tunnel" your connection
| to your local telcom
|
| +1, I came here out of curiosity to see what others have to say,
| but ended up learning something new about how roaming works.
| tiernano wrote:
| So, bit of digging, StarLink's ASN is 14593 [1]. They show as
| having 302 V4 blocks and 59 V6 blocks of space [2]. Some of that
| space (well, most) looks to be GeoLocated in the US, but some
| show as other countries. Same with the V6 blocks [3]. My guess is
| that each V4 block is assigned to a given country or Geo
| Location, and same with a larger V6. Given they use CGNAT, they
| wont need as much V4 blocks to split out. If you bring your
| device with you, it will show a new IP Address... Also, as of
| note, I have seen, at some stage, that it either shows Google's
| IP range, or that Google was announcing their blocks in Ireland
| at one stage... I dont have it myself, but did some digging when
| a someone i know got it...
|
| [1]: https://bgp.he.net/AS14593 [2]:
| https://bgp.he.net/AS14593#_prefixes [3]:
| https://bgp.he.net/AS14593#_prefixes6
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The Google IPs might be because SpaceX and Google have
| agreements where Starlink downlinks can use the network
| connectivity at Google data centers (and vice versa)?
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Google paid for Starlink. It's their loon replacement
| nixgeek wrote:
| Are you able to substantiate that claim somehow? I know
| SpaceX has a commercial arrangement to pay Google for
| services used to deliver Starlink, I'm not aware of
| anything close to "Google shut down Loon; Starlink is the
| replacement; Google is subsidizing/funding Starlink".
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Maybe they meant that google invested to the tune of $1B
| back in 2016 making it one of the largest spacex
| investors.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm not the OP but I also heard rumors that Starlink
| bought Loon IP specifically the LTE stack. Given that we
| know Starlink was using the Google network in the early
| days and Loon was officially shut down months after
| Starlink beta started, it's not hard to imagine that
| there's some partnership.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Geolocation is a fiction, it's just lists that claim addresses
| are in some country. Nobody is under any obligation to make
| sure those claims are true.
| tiernano wrote:
| Also true, but as someone who ran my own asn and space for 5
| years, it can be a pain when it doesn't work. Spent a good
| chunk of time making sure my space showed as Ireland, not us
| or Germany. Netflix, Disney+ and others all didn't like me to
| start... but there are ways of fixing it.
| [deleted]
| nickphx wrote:
| google caching appliances.
| https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
| londons_explore wrote:
| Many of Musks companies have access to internal google API's
| that aren't available to the public.
|
| For example, the in-tesla car map uses various google data
| sources in ways the regular API doesn't support.
| kentlyons wrote:
| Sure just like any (big) company paying for a contract.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Usually not with Google... If you went to Google and said
| "I will pay you $1M to make a custom version of Google maps
| for my company with a pink background but no other
| changes", they wouldn't do it.
|
| Most teams keep the sales guys a long way from engineering,
| and one customers request rarely makes it in.
| kentlyons wrote:
| $1m is what - one person-year, two? Sure that's not
| enough. However it doesn't mean the api is custom. Just
| not the same as the public one. For your specific
| example, Tesla renders thier own map tiles.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Could be Waze APIs?
| zee2345 wrote:
| I imagine if starlink uses local IP address range, it would be
| bound by local ISP rules. All sorts of censorship and filtering.
|
| And avoiding local ISPs may be major reason to use Starlink!
| wmf wrote:
| Countries generally aren't going to allow Starlink to bypass
| their laws.
| reincoder wrote:
| I work for IPinfo.io. For geolocating satellite IP addresses, we
| use a combination of geofeed, rDNS hints etc. Starlink's geofeed
| data is easily accessible [0] which lists out geolocation
| information of their IP ranges. We use rDNS hints as well where
| you can find some geolocation hints from rDNS records.
|
| [0] https://geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv
| netcruiser wrote:
| Each block of IPs probably correspond to a ground station. Your
| data is probably mostly routed to the closest ground station.
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| [dead]
| bobsmooth wrote:
| If this is to be trusted, likely the country the base station
| you're communicating with is in.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jm8iz9/turns_out_...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Starlink says on their FAQ page[1] for the roaming model that if
| you roam too far, your connection will be briefly interrupted
| while they assign you a new IP address.
|
| I think that's because they want every user to have a reasonable
| experience with all the websites out there that do geoIP lookups.
| It also gives them flexibility in the future to not act as a
| worldwide internet backbone for their own users traffic by
| advertising each set of local IP's only at local POP's.
|
| [1]: https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/dhcp-
| config....
| lxgr wrote:
| > It also gives them flexibility in the future to not act as a
| worldwide internet backbone for their own users traffic by
| advertising each set of local IP's only at local POP's.
|
| They'd need multiple ASNs for each of these network islands
| then, though - is their network actually set up like that?
|
| > if you roam too far, your connection will be briefly
| interrupted while they assign you a new IP address.
|
| That's an interesting detail: It seems like they might not
| actually have cross base station roaming/connectivity, unlike
| e.g. mobile ISPs in large countries (where you can keep the
| same IP and maintain open connections even as you're driving
| across the country).
|
| I wonder if Starlink will eventually build out a terrestrial
| backbone to complement their satellite network for these two
| scenarios (i.e. very mobile base stations, such as those on
| airplanes, and terminating their own traffic globally as
| opposed to locally).
| ccakes wrote:
| > They'd need multiple ASNs for each of these network islands
| then, though
|
| No they wouldn't. They could connect to local transit/IXs in
| each region and just advertise the regional networks.
| lxgr wrote:
| Oh, I thought it wasn't possible to announce multiple
| isolated networks on the same ASN without interconnecting
| them, since ASNs are the routing granularity of BGP?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| For something remote it just looks like two different
| prefixes with a different path to reach them. It's even a
| commonly used technique for multi homing so you can
| control which peer ingress traffic comes in on for a
| specific prefix.
| ericpauley wrote:
| One counterexample to this would be Amazon, who have IPs
| globally under one ASN. While they do have a global
| backhaul, it seems unlikely they accept traffic for any
| IP anywhere and route it all on the backhaul.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > accept traffic for any IP anywhere and route it all on
| the backhaul.
|
| This is actually what they do when you enable Global
| Accelerator which is a paid feature. In GCP they have
| similar concept called "Premium Tier"
| ericpauley wrote:
| True! In my post I meant for all traffic.
| zajio1am wrote:
| AS is basic granularity in BGP in the sense that one ASN
| should not be multiple times in AS PATH, and it is
| generally assumed that ASs are internally connected
| (although for non-transit networks, this could be
| workarounded in several ways)
|
| But basic routing entity in BGP is still prefix/route,
| and different routes of one AS can be announced in
| different ways.
| midasuni wrote:
| If I have AS22, advertising 2.2.2.0/24 out of NY, then I
| can reach 1.1.1.1, great
|
| I then have 2.2.3.0/24 advertised out of Frankfurt with the
| same AS. Again I have transit. I can reach 1.1.1.1.
|
| How does a packet from 2.2.2.1 reach 2.2.3.1 --- 2.2.3.0
| won't be advertised by the transit to me in NY as it thinks
| I've already got the route, after all it originated from my
| AS.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They could have something to connect their sites, or even
| tunnel between them over their transit. But if they only
| have customers on their network, likely behind nat, they
| don't need to reach each other.
| ericpauley wrote:
| Presumably since these IPs are in the same AS the
| operator can implement custom routing logic, since they
| control the routing on both sides.
| zajio1am wrote:
| On BGP protocol level, the loop check is on the receiving
| side - received paths are scanned for local ASN.
|
| The transit may not send you your routes with your ASN
| due to how its policies are configured, but that is
| configurable, not protocol-level issue.
|
| And most BGP implementations have knobs to disable the
| loop check, so on your side you could just disable it.
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't think you need multiple ASNs for this. The "server"
| end handles this; if your packet bound for 8.8.8.8 leaves
| Starlink's network in Tulsa, then you get 8.8.8.8's server in
| Tulsa (because that is the route that Google advertised to
| Starlink at that PoP), then the 8.8.8.8 server in Tulsa talks
| to your own DNS server in Houston, and you only serve the IPs
| for your Houston datacenter in that reply as a matter of
| policy. (You might not run the DNS server, of course, but
| that's what, say, Cloudflare would do for you.) Then an
| Internet-wide route controls further traffic; if Starlink
| decides to make that customer's traffic egress in New York,
| then that packet is stuck going cross-country. It doesn't
| have to be that way; you could host your personal website on
| anycast if you wanted to, but it's a lot of work. You don't
| need an ASN per datacenter, though, you just need to control
| your route advertisements on a per-datacenter basis.
|
| GeoIP is a further complication not really related to the
| Internet. The DNS server in Houston can serve replies for
| packets coming from anywhere in the country; instead of
| looking at what network interface they arrived on, it looks
| in a database, decides 1.2.3.4 is in Oklahoma, and provides
| IP addresses for the Houston datacenter because of that. For
| Starlink to provide the best path in that case, it needs to
| understand what that database looks like; it's likely they
| populate it themselves in a protocol outside from any
| Internet machinery. (The most naive databases just look at
| the ASN of the source address, look at where the address of
| the ISP is, and decides that's the location of the IP
| address. But that is too naive to work, so nobody does that
| exactly.)
|
| I would imagine that most of the CDNs / edge compute
| providers use some combination of these two data points to
| route traffic. I have never set anything like this up, so I'm
| not sure what the state of the art is. But, there are many
| tools that you can use, and none of them require having an
| extra ASN.
|
| When I worked at an ISP we did some somewhat-sketchy
| management around this. The databases often have a flag for
| "is this address a cloud provider or a residential ISP
| subscriber?" We would see which of our IP ranges were
| considered residential (we had 0 residential customers), and
| then use them for IP transit subscribers that wanted to sell
| services like scraping Amazon or whatever. Amazon would check
| their database, say "oh this is just a virus-infected cable
| modem", and allow the traffic. If the reputation changed, we
| could just give the address to a transit customer that didn't
| want to do that kind of stuff. Just going to say, I played no
| part in this business decision; it existed when I arrived and
| existed when I left. Gotta pay back the investors somehow, I
| guess!
|
| (At my next job I was on the other side of this; trying to
| combat free trial abuse. The databases were largely useless;
| what happens is that people at high-reputation ISPs get their
| servers hacked and the attacks end up launched from there.
| The big cloud providers were like 100% abuse traffic,
| probably because of free trials of CI systems and things like
| that. Ultimately, most traffic going through a US-based
| transit provider got "please contact sales to do a free
| trial". Actual residential ISPs like Comcast were totally
| fine; thanks Windows Update! Since it was the pandemic,
| everyone was working from home, and thus the business ISPs
| being gated behind "talk to sales" were not a big problem. Oh
| and BTW, I am certain that most of the abuse was from HN
| readers; it started the day after we mentioned our product
| here. That cat and mouse game was some of the most fun I've
| had at work!)
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Starlink has one ASN.
| bizzyb wrote:
| Using starlink at mcmurdo station in Antarctica. The IP shows as
| Sydney, Australia.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I would love to learn more about your day to day in Antarctica!
| Did Starlink really change everything for connectivity there?
| Do most people stay inside?
| bizzyb wrote:
| Starlink was certainly a game changer for life around here.
| McMurdo is essentially a small town so many different jobs
| and routines to make everything go. Some stay inside all the
| time, some have to work outside a lot.
|
| https://brr.fyi/ is a really good blog from a person nearing
| the end of a year long deployment who writes much more
| eloquently than I ever could if you want to read more.
|
| Antarctica: A Year on Ice is an enjoyable film documentary
| from ~10 years ago.
|
| A Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson is also worth a read
| from the early 2000s.
| bart__ wrote:
| Probably the coolest answer in this thread! Did Antarctica have
| any other option for internet, next to the previous gen
| satellites?
| bizzyb wrote:
| Here at McMurdo we've had 24/7 satellite internet for at
| least as long as I've been coming down (~10 years). Think
| roughly a ~30mbps connection shared with ~1000 people with
| business and science bandwidth prioritized over personal
| browsing. So starlink has been a game changer for sure.
|
| At South Pole, I believe they don't yet have access to
| starlink. They also don't have 24 hour coverage for the few
| internet satellites they do get.
|
| I don't work in IT so don't have direct access to more
| specific information, and obviously I can't speak for the
| many other stations scattered throughout the continent.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Personal experience, it assigns based on where you are connecting
| from, and it seems they use the lat/long to be precise, as I used
| it very near the French/Spanish border, and it switched
| immediately when we crossed. It's all behind CGNAT anyway, so I
| use a VPS as a VPN landing point so I can do port forwarding.
|
| There's also a substantial difference in performance depending on
| where you are, I assume depending on how saturated the local
| ground station is - in Portugal, I get near 200Mbps, in Spain,
| 140, in France, 90.
| mkimball wrote:
| Starlink's RFC 8805 geolocation list is publicly available:
|
| https://geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv
|
| Folks interested in geofencing content and such pull from there.
| ftl64 wrote:
| I had an experience using Starlink at a hotel in the Wadi Rum
| desert in Jordan. Funnily enough, I only became aware of this
| after some websites began redirecting me to their German versions
| - turns out our traffic was being routed through a host with an
| IP from one of their STRLNK-POP-FRNTDEU1 pools. The list
| @mkimball linked to doesn't include Jordan, likely because the
| service hasn't been officially launched in the country. This also
| means that, for now, you can enjoy a truly anonymous VPN-less
| browsing experience out of there :)
| SahAssar wrote:
| How would it be anonymous? Spacex ties your account to your
| traffic and most likely logs quite a bit. Or do you just mean
| geo-located to the wrong country?
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I can say that in my experience in western Canada it does show up
| as Canadian, but never in a city in my province. Generally either
| Winnipeg or Toronto where I assume they've got ground stations.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-07 23:02 UTC)