Starlink revisions, Nov 2018

Mark Handley · 172.8K views · 2018-11-09 · 6:47

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Overview

Mark Handley of UCL looks at how SpaceX's November 2018 revisions to the Starlink constellation affect network behavior. The video visualizes the orbits and routing and estimates latencies, building on his earlier video and research paper.

On Hacker News

HN points to Handley's simulations whenever Starlink latency comes up, as the best visualization of orbits and why laser links could beat fiber over long distances.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2023

Topics

Networking & internet infrastructure Space exploration & spaceflight

What people said

cagenut · 2019-05 · Strong recommendation
this guy made an excellent youtube video modeling and visualizing the satellite orbits, the network routing paths across them, and the resulting latencies: [VIDEO] NYC to London on the current internet is 76ms, he shows it across starlink's updated plans as working out to around 46ms. Later in the description he points out a mistake in his own math and says that starlink paths should be 8.7% faster than the video shows, so really jfk<->lhr ~ 42ms.
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paranoidrobot · 2021-02 · Recommendation
Mark Handley has done a bunch of videos analysing this on his channel[0]. The TLDR is that there is a lot of room for Starlink to beat existing terrestrial options IF they can get the laser links working on-orbit. This video[1] shows estimates using what was known about proposed configurations in 2018 [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]
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cagenut · 2020-06 · Recommendation
If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: [VIDEO] [LINK] The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for "processing [&] routing" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.
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Sources

Video by Mark Handley, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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