[HN Gopher] A transport protocol's view of Starlink
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       A transport protocol's view of Starlink
        
       Author : rolph
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2024-11-30 23:12 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.apnic.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.apnic.net)
        
       | NelsonMinar wrote:
       | I noticed a huge improvement just switching to stock BBR to my
       | Starlink as well. During a particularly congested time I was
       | bouncing between 5 to 12 Mbps via Starlink. With BBR enabled I
       | got a steady 12. The main problem is that you need BBR on the
       | server for this to work, as a client using Starlink I don't have
       | any control over what all the servers I connect to are doing.
       | (Other than my one server I was testing with).
       | 
       | I like Huston's idea of a Starlink-tuned BBR, I wonder if it's a
       | traffic shaping that SpaceX could apply themselves in their
       | ground station datacenters? That'd involve messing with the TCP
       | stream though, maybe a bad idea.
       | 
       | The fact that Starlink has this 15 second switching built in is
       | pretty weird, but you can definitely see it in every continuous
       | latency measure. Even weirder it seems to be globally
       | synchronized: all the hundreds of thousands of dishes are
       | switching to new satellites the same millisecond, globally.
       | Having a customized BBR aware of that 15 second cycle is an
       | interesting idea.
        
         | btilly wrote:
         | If you use a VPN, wouldn't it suffice to just make your VPN
         | connection use BBR?
         | 
         | Ditto if you use an https proxy of some kind.
        
           | jofla_net wrote:
           | I would guess that that would be beneficial, but again only
           | if youre using a TCP vpn, which is suboptimal for other
           | reasons. I think it was called meltdown. If that is all you
           | have access to though, im sure it would help.
        
           | Hikikomori wrote:
           | Proxy yes, vpn no. Tcp over tcp vpn is bad, no tcp vpn would
           | make no difference to no vpn.
        
       | sgt101 wrote:
       | Fascinating that the throughput is about 250mbs. Presumably
       | that's over the area served by one satellite? I wonder how much
       | cache they put in each one... I vaguely remember a stat that 90%
       | of requests (in data terms) are served from a TB of cache on the
       | consumer internet, perhaps having the satellites gossip for cache
       | hits would work to preserve uplink bandwidth as well. Maybe
       | downlink bandwidth is the thing for this network though and
       | caches just won't work.
        
         | echoangle wrote:
         | I would be surprised if there is a lot or even any cache on the
         | satellites itself. Fast large storage that's radiation hardened
         | would be extremely expensive, and they have a lot of
         | satellites. The satellites are low enough that general
         | radiation isn't that bad, but every pass through the South
         | Atlantic Anomaly would risk damage if regular flash storage is
         | used.
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-05 23:00 UTC)