For the people who have seen their US48 state earth station setups in person it is pretty normal on the network level. Being colocated with major inter-city long haul dark fiber DWDM regen sites (Level3 dark fiber path Seattle to Boise, ID which has a regen hut site in Prosser, WA is a perfect example) gives them the ability to buy a transport circuit to the nearest major city/IX point and haul traffic there. I believe they're buying single 100 Gbps waves.

On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 2:18 PM Chris J. Ruschmann <chris@scsalaska.net> wrote:

Don’t quote me on this, but I wouldn’t say they are doing anything different than you or I can do and have access to on the routing layer. It's probably just Nokia and Arista and whatever those systems provide. Stuff like Tunneling, ECMP, BFD and VxLan... Think spatially coordinated Zerotier and not based on latency. They also have a pretty good team of experts that have experience with large scale networking and automation they've plucked from various places.

How the Satellites talk to the end users is where all the magic is. But my understanding is that it's all custom developed networking as code that handles all the frequency coordination and hand offs with the ground.

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Subject: Starlink routing

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I read in the Economist that the gen of starlink satellites will have the ability to route messages between each satellite. Would conventional routing protocols be up to such a challenge? Or would it have to be custom made for that problem? And since a lot of companies and countries are getting on that action, it seems like fertile ground for (bad) wheel reinvention?

Mike