I have skimmed the article and the old thread, but I still have questions:
- What's the point of sending ICMP pings to measure RTT, if they will just bounce off of the CGNAT node?
- If two Starlink dishes are talking, is there a scenario where the traffic doesn't have to "land" to go through a ground station? This could be amazing for a remote terminal back home or into a datacenter.
- Are there plans for a smaller, more portable dish?
Unless your two terminals are talking to the same satellite, the answer to whether your traffic has to go through a ground station depends on the topology of the space laser inter-satellite links. Whether the routing in practice allows for a terminal-to-terminal link directly without going through backhaul. I don't know. It would be a miniscule fraction of traffic.
It's worth noting that the laser links are potentially thousands of km long, so they also impose a significant link latency (even if it's lower than the corresponding fiber link.)
I think the benefit of the ICMP testing is to develop a baseline of the network performance characteristics, making it easier to determine what impact various TCP features are having in higher level application/protocol tests.
Theoretically it is possible to do route between arbitrary endpoints, and I think I read a while ago that there was work on this. How well this works for any two terminals that are not on the same satellite depends on the efficiency of routing packets between satellites. I would assume that creating efficient routing paths between dynamic customer terminals and fixed aggregation points makes it easier to provide fairly consistent network performance than building dynamic, rapidly changing paths between arbitrary end points.
There's a further "mini" coming further this year. Not much information other than rough size (approx 10x12"), should "fit in a backpack".
I don't have Twitter direct links off hand but @olegkutkov has found some internals in the firmware (among other stuff) that shows some of the antenna configs and such and it's interesting to see that they're going to be doing a lot with very little, hardware wise, in such a small size.
Starlink blows me away as a concept that you can now walk into a brick and mortar store in some cases, plonk down $600, go to the absolute middle of nowhere with power, plug this weird little rectangle in, sign up (because you can get to starlink.com on a deactivated unit in a walled garden), and get online and pull hundreds of Mbps out of thin air.
- What's the point of sending ICMP pings to measure RTT, if they will just bounce off of the CGNAT node?
- If two Starlink dishes are talking, is there a scenario where the traffic doesn't have to "land" to go through a ground station? This could be amazing for a remote terminal back home or into a datacenter.
- Are there plans for a smaller, more portable dish?