3 ms·

Your math assumes all 100 million customers will be downloading at 10Mbps at the same time, all the time. Obviously that is not the case.

e12e 6y ago
Not "all the time", but at any one time - at the same time (eg: watching superbowl - but of course any kind of multicast/broadcast is a little different). At any rate, it's mostly about the bandwidth each satellite has to route. I don't know what the likely number of subscribers for any one LEO sattelite will be? Will it really be on the order of 100 million notalso served by 4g cellular, dsl and other broadband? Say for new York state its a large area and population total but the area where you might want/prefer satellite service isn't very densely populated?
- ckdarby 6y ago
  Couldn't the satellites themselves cache content that are for world wide events like this? Edit: Even further, if they're launching 12000 of these couldn't that be a CDN network itself?
  - freemint 6y ago
    No, because HTTPS caching is not possible.
    - ckdarby 6y ago
      What I hear you saying is, they'd need to build out an actual CDN service that individual companies would have to sign up and use. This service would allow Starlink to be able to use their own certs themselves or have the owner's certificate. My understanding is Cloudflare's service works this way. I believe this would be a good partnership between both companies. I'm guessing the other approach is similar to Netflix's open connect. Where Netflix is given the option to run what they normally run on their open connect boxes but in a virtualized environment on the satellites themselves. Now, I know that wouldn't seem all that practical if the service was seen as something anyone could sign up and buy because it isn't like these satellites are the same as EC2 instances and it isn't easy to just rack a new one but my gut feeling is that a very tiny portion of content is a substantial amount of bandwidth.
      - e12e 6y ago
        Now that would be interesting - 42.000 satellites running a cloud computing platform in space....
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Maybe there could be a "broadcast" mode where starlink users can "tune in" to a fixed number of "channels" which broadcast extremely popular content.

e12e 6y ago

Not "all the time", but at any one time - at the same time (eg: watching superbowl - but of course any kind of multicast/broadcast is a little different). At any rate, it's mostly about the bandwidth each satellite has to route. I don't know what the likely number of subscribers for any one LEO sattelite will be? Will it really be on the order of 100 million notalso served by 4g cellular, dsl and other broadband? Say for new York state its a large area and population total but the area where you might want/prefer satellite service isn't very densely populated?

ckdarby 6y ago
Couldn't the satellites themselves cache content that are for world wide events like this? Edit: Even further, if they're launching 12000 of these couldn't that be a CDN network itself?
- freemint 6y ago
  No, because HTTPS caching is not possible.
  - ckdarby 6y ago
    What I hear you saying is, they'd need to build out an actual CDN service that individual companies would have to sign up and use. This service would allow Starlink to be able to use their own certs themselves or have the owner's certificate. My understanding is Cloudflare's service works this way. I believe this would be a good partnership between both companies. I'm guessing the other approach is similar to Netflix's open connect. Where Netflix is given the option to run what they normally run on their open connect boxes but in a virtualized environment on the satellites themselves. Now, I know that wouldn't seem all that practical if the service was seen as something anyone could sign up and buy because it isn't like these satellites are the same as EC2 instances and it isn't easy to just rack a new one but my gut feeling is that a very tiny portion of content is a substantial amount of bandwidth.
    - e12e 6y ago
      Now that would be interesting - 42.000 satellites running a cloud computing platform in space....
oh_sigh 6y ago
Maybe there could be a "broadcast" mode where starlink users can "tune in" to a fixed number of "channels" which broadcast extremely popular content.