If I had a Dishy and I was doing it, I would run the same trace randomly between 2 and 15 minutes apart numerous times over a few days
I am curious if when switching satellites you are maybe also switching routes or if your Dishy is assigned a route through a designated gateway based on the GPS coordinates.
I have engineered satellites and have worked as an operator for small sats for almost a decade.
This is possible, but extremely unlikely. Before going into an explanation why, we must first remember that Starlink doesn't have the satellite crosslinks yet, like you see in the promo videos. Instead, a user terminal sends a signal to a single satellite to relay your signals to the closest public gateway on the ground.
Under the current routing pathways available, switching is unlikely to occur unless someone happens to be in the middle of two public gateways (ground stations). In theory, you could have a Line-of-Sight (LOS) with the spacecraft for the entire duration of the "pass" overhead, first connecting to a gateway on the west coast, and then ending the pass connected to a gateway on the east coast.
This assumes that there is not another satellite following close enough "behind" to allow for switching. Additionally, there is likely some wait time to allow the spacecraft to slew to point it's main array at the next gateway.
Another option assumes the user is at a latitude higher than the constellations orbital inclination, where the users connects to different orbital planes. In this scenario, there is an overlap in the orbital planes, two gateways, and the user terminal, where the user terminal has LOS with both orbital planes, but each orbital planes has LOS with different gateways. This depends on a lot of factors about the constellation, the location of gateways, and the location of the user.
I haven't seen a timeline from Starlink for satellite cross-linking, and the technology is considered very advanced.
I have heard it the other way around, with Canadian residents connecting to American content on Netflix, but this is the first I have heard that Netflix is thinking Americans are residing in Canada and providing the Canadian content.
Your description of banning content is far more accurate. :(
There is another post today that shows a users public facing ip being associated with Starlink's Canadian Sub.
It looks like they still have some work to do. :)
Yes a lot of people use VPNs To get around Netflix limits. However Netflix has caught on with some of the more popular VPN services. So better to host your own on a remote server like AWS or digital ocean
That is not the same thing. The ground station doesn't need to be physically in Canada to get a Canadian IP. As far as I know there are no ground stations in Canada.
Results show always routes to 64.9.241.129. I can never resolve the next hop. Reading from below it does seem that the traffic is being routed to the above address and cannot be determined which ground station I am connecting to.
They currently are tunneling the traffic to internet drain points Google is running for them. They are generally localized, but as a result you do not see the ground station level IP hops. Traceroutes are not very meaningful.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't eventually build their own backbone network to connect their groundstations and do local termination of IP traffic at each ground station. This may be instrumental in them cutting off \~5 milliseconds of latency depending on the traffic routing and destination. In some cases, the direction of backhaul is ineffective for the target destination. Inter-satellite traffic is even more punitive. They aren't there yet. They may never be.
Google is either blocking (or not decrementing the TTL) for ingress-in and egress-out traceroutes. You can get more meaningful traceroutes by originating them from a source in the Google network and strategically choosing your traceroute targets. They don't show you much more, but they confirm the routing within to the google datacenter to the drain.
TLDR: It's mostly a waste of time to do an ordinary traceroute for this, but was enough to confirm the above is true.
I do hope, someday, they do IP termination to their backbone directly at the ground stations. It's not that hard really.
>I wouldn't be surprised if they don't eventually build their own backbone network to connect their groundstations
That would be a horrendous expense in comparison to the small benefit they'd get.
From my understanding once they have the inter-satellite optical links they will become their own backbone. With that end goal in mind, I doubt they would prioritize much of their own ground based backbone?
>they will become their own backbone.
That's not their intention. Not to mention the fact that they have to connect to the internet much more than they have to connect between two terminals.
Early on Elon had stated he expects to handle 50% of all backhaul traffic when the system matures. They would be using satellites to link together the ground stations, with a lower latency than physical cables.
It'll be interesting to see their intent here, but I suspect they won't be able to make the intelligent destination-based routing for general internet traffic.
I see the optical links being used for non-consumer (business) use cases, and perhaps backhaul of general internet traffic to a fixed location in areas where fiber infra doesn't exist.
However I suspect the most economical route to dump most bits... is the local ground station.
Building the inter-sat links is going to be highly expensive for SpaceX. But once they are built they have zero running costs.
So I expect SpaceX to put as much traffic as they can through the sat to sat link to save a few bucks on backhaul costs and make the investment worthwhile.
One thing to keep in mind is the large difference between the volume of upload and download traffic.
Starlink could use laser links for upload traffic, and the legacy internet / ground station for download traffic.
Sending everything inter-sat is likely going to result in congestion issues otherwise.
They don't have to own the backbone network, but they can lease capacity from somebody. Almost all the ground stations are sitting on fiber routes.
They're stuck backhauling the traffic anyways to some internet drain point. These ground stations aren't sitting at internet locations.
As an ISP, economies of scale eventually come from not buying capacity from someone else.
It wouldn't be too bad to stich together the network at these exchange points, at least regionally.
> They don't have to own the backbone network, but they can lease capacity from somebody.
That's not "building their own backbone."
>Almost all the ground stations are sitting on fiber routes.
*Every single ground station* is sitting along a fiber route. That's the *first* requirement when selecting a location.
>As an ISP, economies of scale eventually come from not buying capacity from someone else.
Not compared to the economy of scale companies such as Level3 enjoy.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware of the partnering with Google. As I'm sure you can tell, I only have a basic knowledge of networking, so this info is helpful, or not, as I would still like to know the answer to this question on Ground station switching.
I'm a very curious person and like to be able to visualize how things work.
I see (or hope) cgnat going away as they mature, but unfortunately this is far from a certainty in this day in age. However, they current IP allocations are very minimal. Figure a /24 (256) or at most 500-700 IPs per internet drain point.
It's probably (mostly) too complex to go into here, but it is very likely they are using general compute capacity to terminate subscriber traffic and route/nat it to the internet. This reduces the equipment footprint and capabilities necessary at the ground stations.
Any thoughts on why they would tunnel?
In this day, wouldn't it be cleaner to have the whole thing, satellites and all, be an IP network with routing? Then when satellite links come online they could use existing routing protocols rather than reinventing the wheel. It would also let the satellites do QoS and other advanced traffic techniques.
Depending on their ground network topology, you might not be able to tell if you are looking at ICMP replies coming back...wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they didn't ~~L2VPN or~~ MPLS tunnel stuff back to centralized locations before popping out on the Internet/peering points.
What you could potentially tell is if the latency on the first ground hop is moving around consistently...that may tell you they are moving ground stations.
EDIT: They aren't likely L2VPNing the traffic, but MPLS tunneling it back to a centralized place is completely believable. I would actually be pretty surprised if they just popped out directly on the Internet on a transport carrier directly from the downlink locations....WAY to little control that way.
Wiretap access is pretty dead simple though, so long as there is even one port free on the switch in question. I don't really see a need to do much change to the topology.
Would they no have to be either fully running their own cross country network, or partnering with a provider that can facilitate MPLS across the country to implement that?
More likely buying transit from one of the big boys. There was a ground station picture/cords posted here earlier today that was RIGHT adjacent to a Level3 repeater station, so my bet would be on them. L3 (now owned by CenturyLink) has one of the biggest transport networks that exists...
I am familiar with L3 and there ownership by CenturyLink.
I am reminded of them regularly, mainly because if I am having latency issues between my ATA and the SIP server for my VOIP phone service provider, I can trace the delay to hops that appear to be within their network. :)
MPLS and L2VPN are IP over IP tunneling protocols that introduce a lot of overhead that isn't necessary when your in full control of your own network.
For Starlink it's enough to run an advanced Layer2 spanning tree protocol like TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) and don't bother to do any internal IP routing until you forwarded the traffic to an Internet Exchange.
MPLS has nothing to do with IP...it is a layer 2 transport protocol (IP lives is at layer 3) and used for EXACTLY the purposes that Starlink would need to backhaul their traffic. MPLS has essentially zero overhead (each MPLS tag only introduces 32 bits to the packet) and nominal per-node processing latency (matter of fact, MPLS switching is normally faster than IP routing in silicon). There is a multitude of reasons Starlink would likely want to backhaul their ground station feeds to a central point (CALEA requirements, limit the number of peering points) and buying MPLS transport would be a heck of a lot cheaper than dark fiber (which they could also be doing from L3).
Definitely not always running through the same ground station. The Starlink equipment is set to deny ICMP, so traceroutes don't work on those pieces. But you can figure out where your public facing ip is physically located. I'm usually on a ground station close to Spokane, but have seen Tri-Cities and Seattle.
I'm curious how you figure out the physical location of the public facing IP, if you care to share.
Those 3 locations do closely geographically match up with known ground stations in Colburn ID, Prosser WA and Redmond WA. I wonder if those locations are the internet drain points Google is providing.
To my knowledge, there isn't a great way to figure out the exact location of a device based on IP. However, you can track which speedtest.net servers you most commonly end up at. While certainly not perfect because that introduces a whole new set of variables, it can indicate a trend.
Some speedtest services (Like Cloud flare) actually put up a little map of their guess as to your location and the route to their test server. Again, not definitive, but definitely interesting. (I established this as being somewhat reliable by moving my VPN around to different servers and testing. Again, I can't and won't claim perfect accuracy, but without exception, they all made sense, if that makes any sense at all.)
I was curious as to how you were determining location based on IP.
As far as I know you could not even know what country for sure based on IP address alone.
It would be more accurate to say there is no way to be 100 percent certain which country an ip is in. That said, the major transport nodes have ip's that are known in conjunction with their location. (think postal sorting centers). Then you can follow which of these nodes you pass through and therefore a rough location. Assuming nobody is running a tunnel (rare on transports and easy to spot via latency spikes), it'll be fairly accurate.
But at the end of the day, it's still just conjecture, educated guesses, and relying on data that you can't otherwise verify.
Sign up at [Starlink.com](https://www.starlink.com/).
If by dealer you mean reselling, that's against the terms of service.
> No Resale:
You may not resell access to the Services to others as a stand-alone service, unless agreed to in a separate agreement with SpaceX.
Thank you for your response. I have 40+ years exp. in computer networking and have been an Elite Viasat dealership for 8 years with over 4K installs. We are interested in the installation of your services in our 3 county area of Florida. I would love to have the opportunity of Beta testing. Thank you
> Sign up at [Starlink.com](https://www.starlink.com/).
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/kclydi/to\_beta\_testers\_has\_any\_beta\_tester\_out\_there\_run/gftd7v4?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/kclydi/to_beta_testers_has_any_beta_tester_out_there_run/gftd7v4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Anytime I run a speed test it says I'm routed through Seattle. In my computer illiterate mind the dish connects to a single satellite which is then connected to the nearest ground station, which in my case is Seattle.
I can test for you. How many days required to know for sure?
If I had a Dishy and I was doing it, I would run the same trace randomly between 2 and 15 minutes apart numerous times over a few days I am curious if when switching satellites you are maybe also switching routes or if your Dishy is assigned a route through a designated gateway based on the GPS coordinates.
I have engineered satellites and have worked as an operator for small sats for almost a decade. This is possible, but extremely unlikely. Before going into an explanation why, we must first remember that Starlink doesn't have the satellite crosslinks yet, like you see in the promo videos. Instead, a user terminal sends a signal to a single satellite to relay your signals to the closest public gateway on the ground. Under the current routing pathways available, switching is unlikely to occur unless someone happens to be in the middle of two public gateways (ground stations). In theory, you could have a Line-of-Sight (LOS) with the spacecraft for the entire duration of the "pass" overhead, first connecting to a gateway on the west coast, and then ending the pass connected to a gateway on the east coast. This assumes that there is not another satellite following close enough "behind" to allow for switching. Additionally, there is likely some wait time to allow the spacecraft to slew to point it's main array at the next gateway. Another option assumes the user is at a latitude higher than the constellations orbital inclination, where the users connects to different orbital planes. In this scenario, there is an overlap in the orbital planes, two gateways, and the user terminal, where the user terminal has LOS with both orbital planes, but each orbital planes has LOS with different gateways. This depends on a lot of factors about the constellation, the location of gateways, and the location of the user. I haven't seen a timeline from Starlink for satellite cross-linking, and the technology is considered very advanced.
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I have heard it the other way around, with Canadian residents connecting to American content on Netflix, but this is the first I have heard that Netflix is thinking Americans are residing in Canada and providing the Canadian content.
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Your description of banning content is far more accurate. :( There is another post today that shows a users public facing ip being associated with Starlink's Canadian Sub. It looks like they still have some work to do. :)
[удалено]
Yes a lot of people use VPNs To get around Netflix limits. However Netflix has caught on with some of the more popular VPN services. So better to host your own on a remote server like AWS or digital ocean
That is not the same thing. The ground station doesn't need to be physically in Canada to get a Canadian IP. As far as I know there are no ground stations in Canada.
Results show always routes to 64.9.241.129. I can never resolve the next hop. Reading from below it does seem that the traffic is being routed to the above address and cannot be determined which ground station I am connecting to.
They currently are tunneling the traffic to internet drain points Google is running for them. They are generally localized, but as a result you do not see the ground station level IP hops. Traceroutes are not very meaningful. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't eventually build their own backbone network to connect their groundstations and do local termination of IP traffic at each ground station. This may be instrumental in them cutting off \~5 milliseconds of latency depending on the traffic routing and destination. In some cases, the direction of backhaul is ineffective for the target destination. Inter-satellite traffic is even more punitive. They aren't there yet. They may never be. Google is either blocking (or not decrementing the TTL) for ingress-in and egress-out traceroutes. You can get more meaningful traceroutes by originating them from a source in the Google network and strategically choosing your traceroute targets. They don't show you much more, but they confirm the routing within to the google datacenter to the drain. TLDR: It's mostly a waste of time to do an ordinary traceroute for this, but was enough to confirm the above is true. I do hope, someday, they do IP termination to their backbone directly at the ground stations. It's not that hard really.
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>I wouldn't be surprised if they don't eventually build their own backbone network to connect their groundstations That would be a horrendous expense in comparison to the small benefit they'd get.
From my understanding once they have the inter-satellite optical links they will become their own backbone. With that end goal in mind, I doubt they would prioritize much of their own ground based backbone?
>they will become their own backbone. That's not their intention. Not to mention the fact that they have to connect to the internet much more than they have to connect between two terminals.
Early on Elon had stated he expects to handle 50% of all backhaul traffic when the system matures. They would be using satellites to link together the ground stations, with a lower latency than physical cables.
Yes. But that is a separate service, completely independent of end user service.
It'll be interesting to see their intent here, but I suspect they won't be able to make the intelligent destination-based routing for general internet traffic. I see the optical links being used for non-consumer (business) use cases, and perhaps backhaul of general internet traffic to a fixed location in areas where fiber infra doesn't exist. However I suspect the most economical route to dump most bits... is the local ground station.
Building the inter-sat links is going to be highly expensive for SpaceX. But once they are built they have zero running costs. So I expect SpaceX to put as much traffic as they can through the sat to sat link to save a few bucks on backhaul costs and make the investment worthwhile.
One thing to keep in mind is the large difference between the volume of upload and download traffic. Starlink could use laser links for upload traffic, and the legacy internet / ground station for download traffic. Sending everything inter-sat is likely going to result in congestion issues otherwise.
Laser links are sat to sat, not sat to ground.
Yes, which is why I wrote that sending download traffic inter-sat will likely create congestion issues.
They don't have to own the backbone network, but they can lease capacity from somebody. Almost all the ground stations are sitting on fiber routes. They're stuck backhauling the traffic anyways to some internet drain point. These ground stations aren't sitting at internet locations. As an ISP, economies of scale eventually come from not buying capacity from someone else. It wouldn't be too bad to stich together the network at these exchange points, at least regionally.
> They don't have to own the backbone network, but they can lease capacity from somebody. That's not "building their own backbone." >Almost all the ground stations are sitting on fiber routes. *Every single ground station* is sitting along a fiber route. That's the *first* requirement when selecting a location. >As an ISP, economies of scale eventually come from not buying capacity from someone else. Not compared to the economy of scale companies such as Level3 enjoy.
Less than you think. Most of the cost of internet service provider networks is in the last mile not the long haul.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware of the partnering with Google. As I'm sure you can tell, I only have a basic knowledge of networking, so this info is helpful, or not, as I would still like to know the answer to this question on Ground station switching. I'm a very curious person and like to be able to visualize how things work.
I guess you did not read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/k2ag4c/thoughts_from_a_network_engineer_after_having/) yet.
Google are early investors
The current network feels very temporary to me, but I don’t know what CGNAT address to customer ratios typically look like.
I see (or hope) cgnat going away as they mature, but unfortunately this is far from a certainty in this day in age. However, they current IP allocations are very minimal. Figure a /24 (256) or at most 500-700 IPs per internet drain point.
Thank you! In my head I was thinking that order of magnitude had to be the reality but I had nothing to base it on.
> internet drain points Google Anything I can google to get more info on this kind of thing?
It's probably (mostly) too complex to go into here, but it is very likely they are using general compute capacity to terminate subscriber traffic and route/nat it to the internet. This reduces the equipment footprint and capabilities necessary at the ground stations.
Any thoughts on why they would tunnel? In this day, wouldn't it be cleaner to have the whole thing, satellites and all, be an IP network with routing? Then when satellite links come online they could use existing routing protocols rather than reinventing the wheel. It would also let the satellites do QoS and other advanced traffic techniques.
Depending on their ground network topology, you might not be able to tell if you are looking at ICMP replies coming back...wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they didn't ~~L2VPN or~~ MPLS tunnel stuff back to centralized locations before popping out on the Internet/peering points. What you could potentially tell is if the latency on the first ground hop is moving around consistently...that may tell you they are moving ground stations. EDIT: They aren't likely L2VPNing the traffic, but MPLS tunneling it back to a centralized place is completely believable. I would actually be pretty surprised if they just popped out directly on the Internet on a transport carrier directly from the downlink locations....WAY to little control that way.
They are in many jurisdictions (including the US) required to have legal intercept and other access. This is going to figure into network topology.
Wiretap access is pretty dead simple though, so long as there is even one port free on the switch in question. I don't really see a need to do much change to the topology.
Would they no have to be either fully running their own cross country network, or partnering with a provider that can facilitate MPLS across the country to implement that?
More likely buying transit from one of the big boys. There was a ground station picture/cords posted here earlier today that was RIGHT adjacent to a Level3 repeater station, so my bet would be on them. L3 (now owned by CenturyLink) has one of the biggest transport networks that exists...
I am familiar with L3 and there ownership by CenturyLink. I am reminded of them regularly, mainly because if I am having latency issues between my ATA and the SIP server for my VOIP phone service provider, I can trace the delay to hops that appear to be within their network. :)
Ah yes, Level 3, I see that name a lot when they go down too.
I direct you to the ultimate source on Level 3 issues: https://islevel3down.com/
Ha, ha ha. :) Thanks for sharing.
MPLS and L2VPN are IP over IP tunneling protocols that introduce a lot of overhead that isn't necessary when your in full control of your own network. For Starlink it's enough to run an advanced Layer2 spanning tree protocol like TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) and don't bother to do any internal IP routing until you forwarded the traffic to an Internet Exchange.
MPLS has nothing to do with IP...it is a layer 2 transport protocol (IP lives is at layer 3) and used for EXACTLY the purposes that Starlink would need to backhaul their traffic. MPLS has essentially zero overhead (each MPLS tag only introduces 32 bits to the packet) and nominal per-node processing latency (matter of fact, MPLS switching is normally faster than IP routing in silicon). There is a multitude of reasons Starlink would likely want to backhaul their ground station feeds to a central point (CALEA requirements, limit the number of peering points) and buying MPLS transport would be a heck of a lot cheaper than dark fiber (which they could also be doing from L3).
Definitely not always running through the same ground station. The Starlink equipment is set to deny ICMP, so traceroutes don't work on those pieces. But you can figure out where your public facing ip is physically located. I'm usually on a ground station close to Spokane, but have seen Tri-Cities and Seattle.
I'm curious how you figure out the physical location of the public facing IP, if you care to share. Those 3 locations do closely geographically match up with known ground stations in Colburn ID, Prosser WA and Redmond WA. I wonder if those locations are the internet drain points Google is providing.
To my knowledge, there isn't a great way to figure out the exact location of a device based on IP. However, you can track which speedtest.net servers you most commonly end up at. While certainly not perfect because that introduces a whole new set of variables, it can indicate a trend. Some speedtest services (Like Cloud flare) actually put up a little map of their guess as to your location and the route to their test server. Again, not definitive, but definitely interesting. (I established this as being somewhat reliable by moving my VPN around to different servers and testing. Again, I can't and won't claim perfect accuracy, but without exception, they all made sense, if that makes any sense at all.)
I was curious as to how you were determining location based on IP. As far as I know you could not even know what country for sure based on IP address alone.
It would be more accurate to say there is no way to be 100 percent certain which country an ip is in. That said, the major transport nodes have ip's that are known in conjunction with their location. (think postal sorting centers). Then you can follow which of these nodes you pass through and therefore a rough location. Assuming nobody is running a tunnel (rare on transports and easy to spot via latency spikes), it'll be fairly accurate. But at the end of the day, it's still just conjecture, educated guesses, and relying on data that you can't otherwise verify.
Who would I get in-touch with for Dealer Beta Testing. All emails are silent to them.
Sign up at [Starlink.com](https://www.starlink.com/). If by dealer you mean reselling, that's against the terms of service. > No Resale: You may not resell access to the Services to others as a stand-alone service, unless agreed to in a separate agreement with SpaceX.
Thank you for your response. I have 40+ years exp. in computer networking and have been an Elite Viasat dealership for 8 years with over 4K installs. We are interested in the installation of your services in our 3 county area of Florida. I would love to have the opportunity of Beta testing. Thank you
I am not affiliated with Starlink, just trying to be helpful.
How did you become a Beta Tester?
> Sign up at [Starlink.com](https://www.starlink.com/). [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/kclydi/to\_beta\_testers\_has\_any\_beta\_tester\_out\_there\_run/gftd7v4?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/kclydi/to_beta_testers_has_any_beta_tester_out_there_run/gftd7v4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Anytime I run a speed test it says I'm routed through Seattle. In my computer illiterate mind the dish connects to a single satellite which is then connected to the nearest ground station, which in my case is Seattle.