Comment by mrb

>these laser links are used in bursts and the link stays established only for a few tens of seconds or minutes, until the satellites move away

The way Starlink satellites are in orbit, the same satellites will remain "ahead" and "behind" you in the orbital plane. Those laser links (specifically!) will remain relatively persistent. This arrangement is similar to Iridium FYI.

FTA: "in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time"

Most customers aren't served by lasers, their data goes up to the satellite and down to the nearest gateway. Lasers serve customers out of range of a downlink gateway, and the traffic probably travels the minimum hops needed to get to one.

Netflix uses 3-7GB an hour. The average person is spending 4-5hrs a day watching TV. I’d say most are above 100GB/month.

But that’s me.

Yeah 1TB seems average for anyone in IT who is really into data.

I'm kinda pissed their is no local ISP competition in my area....and iv tried reaching out to companies with little success...or they say were expanding to your area soon but will not say when.

10GB symmetric fiber isn't hard. Hell I'd use more bandwidth if I could but I'm stuck with no fiber atm

Data might get counted multiple times as it takes many laser hops to reach its destination.

I’d have guessed they count “delivered bytes” not “transmitted bytes” and then you need to take into account each leg of the transfer. Which for starlink is at least two (for the simple bend pipe situation) and up to potentially something like ?20? (for a “halfway around the globe, totally starlink” connection). The latter is probably statistically negligible, but even the factor two would give ~2% utility. Which, taking into account, that at least 2/3 of the orbit time is spend out of reach of anywhere useful, this would give something like 1 in 10 possible bytes being transmitted. Which is much better than I’d have guessed if asked blindly

I think the average Instagram or TikTok user must be using more than 100GB/month. And if you count YouTube and Netflix, it's probably more than that.

There is one key issue of keeping lasers aligned for long durations between satellites and even between a satellite to a ground station. There are vibrations in satellites and even a tiny bit of that vibration translates to beam misalignment. Am not an expert though. That could explain the bursts.

So it's hard to sustain the theoretical 100GPS connection for hours let alone days across 2 end points which are in constant motion.

That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is probably achievable in ideal situations (eg. 2 satellites very close to each other), so these laser links are used in bursts and the link stays established only for a few tens of seconds or minutes, until the satellites move away and no longer are within line of sight of each other.

I think I agree that each laser is grossly underused on average, but if you read the article, there's quotes about the uptime of these links. They're definitely not just "used in bursts [of] a few tens of seconds or minutes".

> That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity.

Don't forget that every communication protocol has fixed and variable overhead.

The first is a function of the packet structure. It can be calculated by simply dividing the payload capacity of a packet by the total number of bits transmitted for that same packet.

Variable overhead is more complex. It has to do with transactions, negotiations, retries, etc.

For example, while the theoretical overhead of TCP/IP is in the order of 5%, actual overhead could be as high as 20% under certain circumstances. In other words, 20% of the bits transmitted are not data payload but rather the cost of doing business.

The first slide says "9000+", suggesting that the number of space lasers is slightly over 9000. I feel like that's an important distinction.

Starlink's big investor and launch customer was US Air Force.DoD had long complained about lack of fast sat comms, it's also why they effectively own Iridium.

So in addition to households add foreign bases and possibly drone command networks to possible sources of traffic going fast enough to warrant sat-to-sat connection.

My parents moved in and, being old, stream TV all day (instead of cable) and end up using about 40 GB per day with 1080p. We keep hitting our max of 1.2 TB set by our cable company (because there are others in the home!).

I should probably see if my router can bandwidth limit their mac addresses...

> And with 2.3M customers, that's an average 1.7 Mbit/s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB/month.

Dead internet theory (alive and well!)

The average household probably watches significantly more tv than HN users. That is almost all streamed - something like 6 hours per day times multiple TVs.

1tb feels reasonable to push that much video.

There’s probably redundancy in the links. In other words, A sends a MB to B which sends it to C, that’s 1 MB of information transmitted to customers but 2 MB of laser transmission.

I'm seeing about 6Mbps per customer during peak hour on my own network, so 1.7Mbps over a longer period of time sounds like it's in the right ballpark.

"Customer" may refer to households, not individuals, in which case it could be numerous internet users soaking up data per customer.

Just because they seem grossly underused, there are probably plenty of other non-ideal constraints like power usage for instance.

Where did you get that 100GB/mo number from? 4K streaming eats up data transfer quickly. Comcrap & friends knew what they were doing making arbitrary data caps that sounded like a big number at the time. Wireline data caps should be illegal.

if you stream you use a lot more than 100gb/month. I use around 1tb with a family of 3.

i think even more relatable is how many customers they can handle at say 200 mbps