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Comment by bogzz | Hacker News Reader

Well my boss is in a cabin in the wilderness somewhere and his only access to the internet is via Starling, so that's great news!

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I've heard of IP over pigeons, but using starlings is innovative.

Falcon-related packet loss is a recurring issue.

A small price to pay in return for speed increase!

This is even funnier when you imagine Falcon rockets running into Starlink satellites

Quid pro quo, Clarice

Starling is just the product name. It's still IPoAC under the hood.

Wrong. His actual name is Jimbob, and he's a pretty bird.

We've got a family of nuthatches that set up an extensive neighborhood mesh network. Quite impressive!

Notorious for dropping packets.

RFC 2549 was written to cope with that

That’s what those are? The internet truly is a filthy place.

African or European packets

That's why you should use Turkey Clutch Protocol rather than Unladen Duck Protocol.

Sometimes you have to keep repeating a packet, they're very good at it.

Learn something new every day! I had never heard of RFC 1149[1] and was only familiar with Pigeonrank[2], another short-lived product.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149 [2] https://archive.google/pigeonrank/

Starlings are lower bandwidth than pigeons

They're reliable, provided there's a cherry tree orchard at the destination.

Their Starlord is the key to keeping them on task.

Who?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

The RFC-1149 pigeon protocol has its own theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIzLlODqyCE

I too am in the wilderness and Starlink is my only broadband, but I was smart enough to keep my 1.5Mbps WISP connection (radio mounted 170' up one of my redwoods) so I'm still in good shape for basic communication, even some streaming and videoconferencing, though those aren't great this morning.

Also, after my Starlink terminal rebooted a few times on its own over the last hour or so, things are looking good again.

Are you using something like a CradlePoint for your WISP?

If it 1,5 Mb and radio mount on a tower I would more guessing toward the side of PTP line of sight Link or such Mikrotik, Unifi instead of cellular cradlepoint.

In the US:

Ubiquiti, Cambium, probably not Tarana because that's way too expensive for a 1.5Mbps sub. Mikrotik radios are fairly rare here, but the routers and switches are everywhere.

Thats interesting ! Mikrotik routers and switches are very cheap, I wonder why they one product line is extremely common but the radios are rare rather than roughly equivalent spread ?

Just generally not as reliable or as advanced as the competition for not much more, generally. They are doing some interesting work with LTE in Latvia though.

Mikrotik has not (yet?) gone down the path of shipping sector radios supporting massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output -- an 8x8 array can deliver 8 times as much data as 1 stream within the same channel size) as vendors like Cambium have. The additional capacity on tower sectors from additional streams combined with MU-MIMO (Multi-User MIMO that transmits to multiple subscriber radios at the same time based on the number of streams the transmitter supports combined with client radios that are typically 2x2) is a great way to gain capacity where spectrum is exhausted. Higher order QAM support like the new 12 bits per symbol modulation in 802.11be tends not to be so useful for WISPs as getting the SNR to the level required to support it tends to be is challenging, especially in 6 GHz spectrum where transmit power limitations require much higher gain antennas for client radios (at least here in Canada where EIRP is limited to 36dBm).

Mikrotik is still quite heavily used for their routers and switches among WISPs. They are the most affordable vendor for 100Gbps switches. Pity we don't have a better open source software stack for their hardware.

Ubiquiti is also actively neglecting the WISP market. Anything that isn't UniFi seems to be mostly abandoned these days.

Hasn’t he heard of ravens? Much more reliable.

Yeah, but all they say is "nevermore".

in my day we used pigeons

Digression ... you must be using "wilderness" in it's colloquial form, because technically, if he's in a cabin he can't be in wilderness. Federally designated wilderness areas don't allow permanent human habitation.

The cabin is located in the wilderness, not part of it, and it’s real wilderness, not a wilderness designated area

Furthermore, the planet we are on cannot possibly be in space. Space is mostly empty, has no breathable atmosphere, there are no trees or grocery stores there, etc.; Earth is quite the opposite.

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