Comment by londons_explore
1 year ago
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.