Starlink routing

Mon Jan 23 22:18:00 UTC 2023

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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From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+chris=scsalaska.net at nanog.org> On Behalf Of Michael Thomas
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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