Comment by carlhjerpe
1 year ago
Yep, but that data originates from the providers network and never leave the providers network, so they probably don't count it towards your usage the same way.
I don't think that breaks net neutrality either, which the FCC seems to be reimplementing
Edit: see https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
All my data usage is over LTE and NR. On one line it mostly gets used for streaming video (YouTube,plex,twitch) and averages around 500GB/mo. I rent a line to a friend and he's doing over 10TB/mo on mostly machine learning stuff and astronomy data.
T-Mobile absolutely counts all data used over the network, my voice lines go QCI 9 (they are normally QCI 6) when over 50GB of any kind of data usage each month, the home internet lines are always QCI 9. I don't have congestion in my area so it does not affect my speeds. This is QoS prioritization that happens at physical sector level on the tower(s).
They absolutely count it the same way. Comcast just gives me a number for bytes used, with a limit of (IIRC) 1.2TB above which they start metering. Our family of four comes dances around hitting that basically every month. The biggest consumer actually isn't video, is my teenage gamer's propensity for huge game downloads (also giant mod packs that then break his setup and force reinstall of the original content).
I think a few hundred GB for a typical cord-cut household is about right.
This obviously has no relevance for starlink which does not have local datacenters for cdn purposes. All that bandwidth is going through the satellites right before it reaches the user.
I wouldn't be surprised if starlink doesn't at least experiment with making the satellites a big bunch of CDN nodes.
Imagine they put 10TB of flash memory on the satellites and run virtual machines for the big CDN companies (cloudflare, Google, Netflix etc).
I reckon that 10TB is still big enough to service a good little chunk of internet traffic.
Definitely sounds like a no-brainer / reasonable next step.
Most ISPs have CND appliances in their racks to save on uplink bandwidth. And from a satellite perspective the uplink (in this scenario: the downlink from the satellite to the gateway) definitely is the expensive bottleneck.
You want to avoid congestion and every bit of caching could be helpful.
Then it comes down to the mass and power budget (and the reliability of flash drives in space) - but that doesn't seem too terrible.
I guess the problem is that most of the useful bits of that 10 TB are going to be most of the time somewhere far away from the target audience.
You have to share that 10 TB with everything on that satellite's orbit.