zlacker

Most customers aren't served by lasers, their data goes up to the satellite and down to the nearest gateway. Lasers serve customers out of range of a downlink gateway, and the traffic probably travels the minimum hops needed to get to one.

>>bottle+(OP)
But with lasers, it makes sense to route your packets via space. For example traffic to a different continent would be faster (and cheaper) through space. Furthermore, I assume lasers have more capacity than gateways, so they could increase capacity of one satellite by bundling with more gateways.

>>whazor+Or
I thought that Starlink always "landed" to a base station back in the same jurisdiction? I think relaying through space could open a regulatory can of worms.

>>whazor+Or
Unfortunately, the routing to make this feasible doesn’t exist yet. Users need a single IP address from a range that’s homed at a single PoP. Starlink doesn’t support user-user connections through the mesh, you need to go all the way out to your PoP, then over to the other users PoP, then back through Starlink to that user.

>>beejiu+jB
What kind of worms?

>>psd1+pE
Bypassing spying, geofencing and other regulatory stuff, perhaps? Also curious what the can of worms might be.

>>psd1+pE
All countries have strict regulations on radio waves, whether that's sending or receiving. The UK for example requires a license for base stations that stipulates things like geographical boundaries, etc.

You can't freely blast radio waves into a country without falling subject to its varying regulations, but the regulations for "pre Starlink" satellite broadband/phones/etc are fairly well established.

>>beejiu+e51
Well maybe it makes sense for US costumer to send their traffic down from Starlink in Canada and then via fiber to the USA? I do not really see the problem if the traffic is encrypted and forwarded.

>>quailf+oC
Are you talking about peer-to-peer connections between two Starlink users, like if they were both in the same satellite's range but separated by a really tall mountain between, etc.?

>>beejiu+e51
Does this count for radio waves beamed in from space (like GPS)?