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It’s the ISP equivalent of setting up stall at a wholesale market. To exchange traffic, providers advertise the IP ranges they can route. The starter pack for

It’s the ISP equivalent of setting up stall at a wholesale market. To exchange traffic, providers advertise the IP ranges they can route. The starter pack for this consists of an AS number (which is fundamentally just a nominal integer identifier for your organisation), an interconnect (either to an internet exchange or a transit provider), and some address space to call your own. The notability is commercial: StarLink is ready, or at least preparing, to negotiate peering with other providers. That’s a whole other ball game, c.f http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering-Playbook.html http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering.... There’s also a social angle. I’ve seen folks wearing their ASN like an agency windcheater. Network engineers are tribal.

walrus01 6y ago
Network engineers are tribal but also very cooperative (in the right geographic areas). You can get about 240,000 ipv4 routes out of the entire 840,000 size ipv4 routing table by peering with the SIX route servers. And for any entity that is big enough to be seen as a real serious player, places like where the SIX if physically located are also optimal to establish direct sessions (PNIs) with other large/serious ISPs. All settlement free. Major content sources, CDNs and hosting providers have a strong interest in getting outbound traffic off their networks as efficiently as possible. And downstream eyeball ISPs (starlink) have the same interest in reverse.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> The notability is commercial: StarLink is ready, or at least preparing, to negotiate peering with other providers. That’s a whole other ball game, c.f http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering... http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering.... Can you delve into the possible business models (not military)_ and commercial applications if this remains? Starlink is seriously this biggest mystery to me about SpaceX's over all trajectory, I find it fascinating but ,my mind doens't conjure up many more thoughts than they'll either be an ISP or work with ISPs to reach a currently unavailable demographic, the nuts and bolts of how are entirely lost on me as I realistically don't understand the Industry.
- fragmede 6y ago
  (I couldn't load the drpeering.net link.) As far as business models having this enables, it's digital land that belongs to SpaceX/StarLink, which doesn't really restrict what sort of business can be run with it. ISPs will have an AS (sometimes more than one), but non-ISP Internet companies sometimes also have an AS. Google for, example has AS15169 [0] and Google Search and Maps and YouTube and everything is served from there. (Ignore Google Fiber as it predates it.) Wikipedia[1] goes into peering far more elaborately than I, but it would be pure speculation on my part to say anything more elaborate than "StarLink will be an ISP". Elon Musk could give the StarLink receiver hardware away for free and start his own TV channel, having this AS enables that, but doesn't give any indication other than StarLink intends to be on the Internet in a some way. (Not that you'd necessarily need an AS to have a TV channel.) [0] https://bgp.he.net/AS15169#_whois https://bgp.he.net/AS15169#_whois [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone
- gpm 6y ago
  I think it's a pretty safe bet that starlink will act just as an ISP. The business model is obvious, "existing ISPs target people living in permanent ground based dwellings in densely populated areas well, we'll target everyone else". Everyone else includes some obvious lucrative targets, passenger jets (especially on intercontinental flights), ocean fairing ships, rich people living in places that simply aren't hooked up to other ISPs - such as many cottages. The military isn't particularly interesting, for the most part they're just a special case of the ship and plane market segment.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  There's a tongue-in-cheek view that Elon Musk is a lonely alien just trying to get home. His Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic is on the blink, so creating a privately-operated interplanetary transportation programme from first principles was the next best plan. Alternatively, view these interests (grid-scale batteries, solar panels, underground excavation, autonomous vehicles (cars, rockets, spacecraft), hyperloops, benevolent AGI, low-latency satellite internet &c &c) as essential infrastructure technologies for derisking survival on Mars and even beyond, thereby increasing the likelihood that the humans will survive even the gross mismanagement of their current planet, or a passing Vogon Constructor Fleet, by metastasising across Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha. Which is to say, that: > SpaceX's overall trajectory is a Hohmann transfer orbit, or a nice hot cup of tea.

walrus01 6y ago

Network engineers are tribal but also very cooperative (in the right geographic areas). You can get about 240,000 ipv4 routes out of the entire 840,000 size ipv4 routing table by peering with the SIX route servers. And for any entity that is big enough to be seen as a real serious player, places like where the SIX if physically located are also optimal to establish direct sessions (PNIs) with other large/serious ISPs. All settlement free. Major content sources, CDNs and hosting providers have a strong interest in getting outbound traffic off their networks as efficiently as possible. And downstream eyeball ISPs (starlink) have the same interest in reverse.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> The notability is commercial: StarLink is ready, or at least preparing, to negotiate peering with other providers. That’s a whole other ball game, c.f http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering... http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Art-Of-Peering-The-Peering.... Can you delve into the possible business models (not military)_ and commercial applications if this remains? Starlink is seriously this biggest mystery to me about SpaceX's over all trajectory, I find it fascinating but ,my mind doens't conjure up many more thoughts than they'll either be an ISP or work with ISPs to reach a currently unavailable demographic, the nuts and bolts of how are entirely lost on me as I realistically don't understand the Industry.

fragmede 6y ago
(I couldn't load the drpeering.net link.) As far as business models having this enables, it's digital land that belongs to SpaceX/StarLink, which doesn't really restrict what sort of business can be run with it. ISPs will have an AS (sometimes more than one), but non-ISP Internet companies sometimes also have an AS. Google for, example has AS15169 [0] and Google Search and Maps and YouTube and everything is served from there. (Ignore Google Fiber as it predates it.) Wikipedia[1] goes into peering far more elaborately than I, but it would be pure speculation on my part to say anything more elaborate than "StarLink will be an ISP". Elon Musk could give the StarLink receiver hardware away for free and start his own TV channel, having this AS enables that, but doesn't give any indication other than StarLink intends to be on the Internet in a some way. (Not that you'd necessarily need an AS to have a TV channel.) [0] https://bgp.he.net/AS15169#_whois https://bgp.he.net/AS15169#_whois [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone
gpm 6y ago
I think it's a pretty safe bet that starlink will act just as an ISP. The business model is obvious, "existing ISPs target people living in permanent ground based dwellings in densely populated areas well, we'll target everyone else". Everyone else includes some obvious lucrative targets, passenger jets (especially on intercontinental flights), ocean fairing ships, rich people living in places that simply aren't hooked up to other ISPs - such as many cottages. The military isn't particularly interesting, for the most part they're just a special case of the ship and plane market segment.
inopinatus 6y ago
There's a tongue-in-cheek view that Elon Musk is a lonely alien just trying to get home. His Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic is on the blink, so creating a privately-operated interplanetary transportation programme from first principles was the next best plan. Alternatively, view these interests (grid-scale batteries, solar panels, underground excavation, autonomous vehicles (cars, rockets, spacecraft), hyperloops, benevolent AGI, low-latency satellite internet &c &c) as essential infrastructure technologies for derisking survival on Mars and even beyond, thereby increasing the likelihood that the humans will survive even the gross mismanagement of their current planet, or a passing Vogon Constructor Fleet, by metastasising across Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha. Which is to say, that: > SpaceX's overall trajectory is a Hohmann transfer orbit, or a nice hot cup of tea.