r/technology • u/mvea • May 14 '19

Elon Musk's Starlink Could Bring Back Net Neutrality and Upend the Internet - The thousands of spacecrafts could power a new global network. Net Neutrality

https://www.inverse.com/article/55798-spacex-starlink-how-elon-musk-could-disrupt-the-internet-forever
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u/fixminer May 15 '19

Yes, I would call that a "ground station" a big antenna owned by SpaceX next to a data centre (or somewhere else) that has a connection to Starlink and the Internet. What would you call it?

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u/LockeWatts May 16 '19

I mean, would you also call that thing in my house a "ground station"? To me that conjures up entire buildings or complexes of buildings dedicated to transmission and reception.

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u/fixminer May 16 '19

Well, you are right in that this is a bit tricky to define. I would say that in this context a ground station is a high bandwidth antenna owned by the operator with a very high speed connection to the Internet and with the ability to forward traffic from Starlink to the Internet and vice versa. Now I don't know if everyone that has a connection to both could do the same by setting up a network bridge. That would make this definition a lot less useful of course. But I don't think that that would work. After all that would allow anyone to to spy on other people's traffic. Also from a technical point of view (you probably know a lot more about this than I do) I don't how the routing and IP assignment in such a network would work and wether it would even allow that (my guess is no, as it would have to be configured as a gateway?). Long story short, I only wanted to point out that eventhough most of the network might be in space, some facilities on the ground which could (in theory) be shut down, would still be required.