zlacker

>>alden5+(OP)
So that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is probably achievable in ideal situations (eg. 2 satellites very close to each other), so these laser links are used in bursts and the link stays established only for a few tens of seconds or minutes, until the satellites move away and no longer are within line of sight of each other.

And with 2.3M customers, that's an average 1.7 Mbit/s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB/month. (HN readers are probably outliers; I consume about 1 TB/month).

>>mrb+b46
Netflix uses 3-7GB an hour. The average person is spending 4-5hrs a day watching TV. I’d say most are above 100GB/month.

But that’s me.

>>garcia+y66
Yep, but that data originates from the providers network and never leave the providers network, so they probably don't count it towards your usage the same way.

I don't think that breaks net neutrality either, which the FCC seems to be reimplementing

Edit: see https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

>>lillec+D76
This obviously has no relevance for starlink which does not have local datacenters for cdn purposes. All that bandwidth is going through the satellites right before it reaches the user.

>>ancien+Lt6
I wouldn't be surprised if starlink doesn't at least experiment with making the satellites a big bunch of CDN nodes.

Imagine they put 10TB of flash memory on the satellites and run virtual machines for the big CDN companies (cloudflare, Google, Netflix etc).

I reckon that 10TB is still big enough to service a good little chunk of internet traffic.

>>london+OK6
Definitely sounds like a no-brainer / reasonable next step.

Most ISPs have CND appliances in their racks to save on uplink bandwidth. And from a satellite perspective the uplink (in this scenario: the downlink from the satellite to the gateway) definitely is the expensive bottleneck.

You want to avoid congestion and every bit of caching could be helpful.

Then it comes down to the mass and power budget (and the reliability of flash drives in space) - but that doesn't seem too terrible.