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Comment by zyf | Hacker News Reader

Not advocating for either side here, but the ability for US gov to control/influence internet access on a global scale is, to me, the main driver behind Starlink. tinfoil hat off

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Isn't the percentage of the world population that gets internet via Starlink very low? Also, how was the US government involved in the creation of Starlink?

Agree with you - Starlink doesn't have a government connection. In fact the reason it was successful is that it didn't have one. The government connected internet was the landlines that the cable companies were trying to deploy in the rural America for high cost tax paying dollars.

It is a US company though - but I think this is very tin foil hat territory here.

> Starlink doesn't have a government connection.

US DOD is contracting Starlink in Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...

Originally on inception -- sorry should have clarified for the purposes of the speculation purposes that it is US gov controlled.

Do you honestly think any US industry is impervious to being coopted by this corrupt administration?

I do - more so than most other countries.

Thank you for the optimism. I hope you're right.

Starshield is a very important revenue stream that helps fund Starlink overall.

There is an argument that could be made that if the government didn't provide SpaceX contracts they'd never have the capital available to put Starlink into operation.

That's not a supportable argument. The US government has been extremely fickle about their support of SpaceX's Starlink. Witness the revocation of the funding for rural communities. If you're referring to NASA and other government agencies contracting for launch services, well sure, but that too was an open market that SpaceX won on clear merit.

In my community, Starlink is very popular, because the local DSL (the only option) is terrible. Fiber projects exist, but they are totally blocked by processes requiring the approval of native tribes if trenches dug for fiber discover piles of shells left behind by tribes hundreds of years ago.

In entirely different areas, I see Starlink terminals popping up on every mining and forestry contractor's truck. I suspect Starlink's popularity among those who roam widely is just as important, if not moreso, than any funding the federal government has provided, because that is a clear and sustainable revenue that is entirely based on practical industrial applications.

Oh watch as the new phones get satellite access for cents......

The gov is kinda involved because every rocket launch from US soil must be approved by a gov agency, including the payload manifest.

I want you to seriously imagine a world where any idiot can launch a rocket into space carrying anything they want. You think the FDA is over reach too?

You are right, only the real men who throw HEILs while k-holing should be able to do it

There are some things that the US does heavily control on a global scale, but internet access is not one of them. It's much easier for countries to create walled internet gardens than to create walled finance gardens. Many of them have been doing it for a long time.

How do Starlink IP addresses work with Geolocation? Does Starlink have access to IP address blocks for all coutnries and issue them out based on registration and/or GPS data? Or do all starlink customers worldwide get issued US IPs?

Note that there's no such thing as "US IPs". GeoIP works by induction: "OK, this operator is in France, so all addresses in this range are probably in France; these ones are probably close to Paris, which is where this internal router is;" etc.

If I had to guess, you probably get the address of the base station whose signals reflect off the satellite, which is probably not very far from you, given the satellites are in LEO.

EDIT: I meant to say that you get an address in the ground station's subnetwork. I don't know if Starlink uses NAT.

I hadnt even considered that there were multiple ground stations. I just assumed the Starlink satelites would just all bounce the signal back to base in the US.

That would have a decent amount of latency as you'd have a space trip around the world, then a ground trip to any EU/Asia site.

As opposed to a ground trip to a local base station and then a trip around the world on the ground? Sounds like it would be the same to me.

The first Starlink constellations didn't have inter-satellite links at all:

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/

Also, people in Europe don't want to have to take a round trip to space via America just to pull up IKEA's website hosted next door. That's a lot of pointless latency when you could bounce it down to a nearby ground station instead.

GeoIP works by many different means. There are many different GeoIP databases which contain different data based on different opinions. Some are voluntarily reported, some by ping timings, some based on the registered address of the owner of the block of IPs, some based on business records, some based on third party reporting of other direct measurements, etc.

Starlink, in particular, reports their base station locations: https://geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv

> Note that there's no such thing as "US IPs".

Sure there are. IP addresses assigned to an organization with a US address (typically by ARIN) are US IPs. Of course, there's nothing that requires those IPs to be used exclusively for destinations inside the US.

Exactly. So, there aren't US IPs. At best IP ranges are indicative of network topology, not location.

Starlink IPs are assigned to the closest ground station. I used Starlink during a transatlantic crossing. The first half of the trip our IP address was based in Madrid. At about 2/3 of the way it changed to a Virginia based IP. And as we got closer to the Caribbean a Miami based IP.

That would cause your active connections to break because the source IP changed entirely. Are you sure the IP changes abruptly, or they keep it for as long as the session is live? Though keeping the original IP would mean that, for example, if you are sailing around the world, you'd start getting worse and worse latency as all your data continues going to the original ground station which may be on the other side of the world at that point.

An interesting problem - I wonder what they truly do here. I suppose people expect interruptions with Starlink so doing an IP swap wouldn't be all that different to losing service due to obstruction for a few minutes.

IP addresses change all the time. It changes when connect to WiFi, it changes when enter new country, it changes when provider gives you new address. I cant tell if changes on mobile, it looks like mobile providers hand off to next tower, but there must be a limit of how far can go before routing breaks.

Everything retries cause there isn’t difference between new address or bad connection. Most of time we don’t notice cause not using device. Or because most connections are short lived.

I'm aware that the public IP changes when a phone (on which one hardly has much control over how things run anyway), switches from cellular to a WiFI network.

Your comments are more practical (and maybe aimed at a layman's use of Starlink) but I am talking about the theory of Starlink supposedly interrupting a perfectly-working connection in order to change your IP, which interrupts everything, by design of TCP/conntrack. Whether that operation is fatal or not due to retries or whatever else is not my point at all.

Also, ISPs at home don't randomly disconnect you to give you a new IP. They may give you a new IP when you disconnect and reconnect for other reasons, but they should never dump your connection on purpose just to give you a new IP for no reason. That's not good design at all, hence the question about how Starlink handles wanting to give you a new IP.

As the sibling comment asked, did this change when you reconnected or did it kick you off and give you a new IP in the middle of a connection?

Who knows. I was busy sailing, cooking and fishing. One day my Google searches are Spanish prioritized, the next day they are American prioritized. Starlinks are relatively power hungry so we power it up, connect, gather weather and other tasks, and then power down.

What I do know is our IP changed depending on our geographic location.

I don't know exactly how it works, but I do know that my phone thought it was in Australia after connecting to my Starlink terminal here in BC.

It will never be cost competitive with terrestrial connections in places where most people live. It’s great for remote areas. It will never be able to control a large portion of global internet traffic.

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