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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

What kind of worms?

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

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.

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.

Does this count for radio waves beamed in from space (like GPS)?

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.

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.?

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