On Fri, 10 Nov 2023, Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink wrote:
There is no prohibition against sharing. The closest that document
comes to it is: "The Standard Service Plan is designed for personal,
family, or household use."
And, the specs of Starlink WiFi Router say "Mesh - Compatible with up to
3 Starlink Mesh nodes". Why 3 and not 4, one might wonder.
Yet there are additional technical reasons as to why extending the WiFi
to others is inconvenient. For both IPv4 and IPv6 the other users would
be situated behind NATs, multiple levels of them. It would break
certain apps.
given how many users live behing multiple layers of NAT now, I think there are
fewer apps that would break than you think (and in terms of overall traffic,
it's a very small percentage)
I'm not a fan of wifi mesh, it can work in some conditions, but it breaks down
quickly under load (aittime utilization, be it number of nodes, number of users,
area covered, or bandwidth used). But setting up a structured distribution to a
number of APs can scale well (I run the wireless network at the Scale conference
and use simple APs (most over a decade old now) running openWRT to support >3500
geeks over a 100,000 sq ft facility)
This kind of WiFi sharing was tried and with some degree of success to
ground multi-ISP settings. My home ISP WiFi allows other users having
same ISP at their home. Some agreements exist between some ISPs to
expand that domain of allowance.
that's still a guest mode on a bunch of separate uplink networks, not the same
as sharing one uplink network with a wide group of people.
Here we talk about only one ISP. Starlink might want, as a first step,
to allow other users that have Starlink at their home. When more space
ISPs like this will appear, maybe some agreements might happen.
I'm not understanding what you think Starlink is prohibiting here.
each dish in an area imposes noticable overhead, beyond simply the bandwidth
the user consumes, so it's better for the starlink system to have fewer dishes
that distribute to the same number of users, with the same usage patterns.
resale is prohibited.
resale is prohibited, but cost sharing is not, and I don't even think that
resale of the service to the community would be prohibited, just resale of the
equipment, or setting yourself up as a distributer of starlink service and
equipment.
David Lang
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