Mark Handley
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2018–2023
6:47 · 173K views · Nov 9, 2018
Mark Handley of UCL looks at how SpaceX's November 2018 revisions to the Starlink constellation affect network behavior. The video visualizes the orbits and routing and estimates latencies, building on his earlier video and research paper.
HN points to Handley's simulations whenever Starlink latency comes up, as the best visualization of orbits and why laser links could beat fiber over long distances.
11 comments from Hacker News
this guy made an excellent youtube video modeling and visualizing the satellite orbits, the network routing paths across them, and the resulting latencies: this video NYC to London on the current internet is 76ms, he shows it across starlink's updated plans as working out to around 46ms. Later in the description he points out a mistake in his own math and says that starlink paths should be 8.7% faster than the video shows, so really jfk<->lhr ~ 42ms.
If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: this video [LINK] The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for "processing [&] routing" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.
Mark Handley has done a bunch of videos analysing this on his channel[0]. The TLDR is that there is a lot of room for Starlink to beat existing terrestrial options IF they can get the laser links working on-orbit. This video[1] shows estimates using what was known about proposed configurations in 2018 [0] [LINK] [1] this video
The FCC filing has a lot of good technical details on the deployment and frequency usage. Additionally, Mark Handley has a good primer on it. It may kill actual east-west terrestrial traffic due to latency improvements: this video North-South will still be terrestrial.
Here's some great visualizations of the orbits and an explanation of what it means that the orbits are optimized for the northern hemisphere. (This confused me at first since obviously any orbit has to go just as far south as it does north of the equator.) this video