Thread

Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack

183 points · 182 comments · giuliomagnifico

yanis_t · 1790247676 · focus · HN ↗
For anyone interested, there’s another part of the Starlink besides the satellites and your dish - ground stations (gateways) [].
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
<a href="https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895-5d248fa63b66" rel="nofollow">https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895...
1. chinathrow · 1790248018 · focus · HN ↗
  Are they required to have precise locations listed?
  1. embedding-shape · 1790248630 · focus · HN ↗
    How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".
  2. toast0 · 1790248940 · focus · HN ↗
    In many jurisdictions, you need a license to operate a teleport, and the applications are public and require a precise location.
    There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
    someonebaggy · 1790260745 · focus · HN ↗
    and yes, they are actually called teleports, that's not a typo
  3. sschueller · 1790250100 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.
  4. numpad0 · 1790251501 · focus · HN ↗
    these seem to be just operator hq locations, not necessarily the station street addresses. but yeah, the locations would be public information.
2. kamranjon · 1790248317 · focus · HN ↗
  Huh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
  Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
  1. spockz · 1790248491 · focus · HN ↗
    It is. But at some point traffic had to hit the ground to connect to other parts of the internet. That happens at these ground stations.
    lxgr · 1790256775 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't have to happen at exactly these specific ground stations, though (although any outage will increase the load on in-space forwarding capacity and downlink capacity of some other satellites, though).
  2. 1718627440 · 1790249171 · focus · HN ↗
    But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.
  3. numpad0 · 1790249922 · focus · HN ↗
    the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
    the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
    what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
    their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
  4. robertlagrant · 1790250824 · focus · HN ↗
    Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
    someonebaggy · 1790260720 · focus · HN ↗
    how exactly do you think the packets get from your computer to reddit.com without a ground station being involved somewhere?
    robertlagrant · 1790425841 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, fair point. I meant that ground stations don't need to be everywhere Starlink customers are now.
  5. mbreese · 1790251140 · focus · HN ↗
    All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
    1) you send a signal to the satellite
    2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
    3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
    The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
    Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
    With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
    Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
    Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
    The signal can go from:
    customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
    This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
    numpad0 · 1790252254 · focus · HN ↗
    but there are other LEO Internet services, like Iridium and Globalstar that just don't compare, like 100x slower at 5x monthly price for 1000x less data.
    "because LEO" don't explain why Starlink is like million times cheaper and faster than competitors while singlehandedly being reponsible for like 75% of man-made objects in space currently and past.
    bob1029 · 1790253980 · focus · HN ↗
    If you are stuck on a ship in a typhoon, iridium is precisely the system you want to be using.
    Palpatineli · 1790252445 · focus · HN ↗
    What you are calling 'internet' is the land based backbone that's connecting to the 'rest of the internet'. The term is thus relative. Now of course there is next to no servers directly on the sate to sate network save for a few companies with special contracts. But with the AI sate halo there will inevitably be other server sate.
    lxgr · 1790256537 · focus · HN ↗
    > Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit.
    Arguably Starlink's special sauce is quantity of satellites and massively higher bandwidths combined with high-gain, electronically steered beams on both sides (i.e. terminal and satellite).
    None of these are net-new as technologies: We've had LEO based telecommunications satellites for over two decades now (Iridium and Globalstar, the former of which even has in-space forwarding as well), as well as directional beams on both sides, but rarely all in one system and never at this scale.
    kamranjon · 1790260374 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that true though? 5g is significantly faster than starlink
    someonebaggy · 1790260654 · focus · HN ↗
    yes it's true that starlink has shitloads of satellites
    mbreese · 1790266345 · focus · HN ↗
    In my opinion, the quantity of satellites needed is a function of the height of the satellites. You only need a large constellation because they are moving so fast relative to the earth. This means that each satellite can only see a limited arc at a time. So, in order to cover a large enough area, you have to have multiple satellites following after each other.
    The phased array antenna is also a function of this. Each satellite is moving so much that you need to have an antenna following the satellite across the sky.
    So, once Starlink decided to have a low earth orbiting constellation (for better latency and bandwidth), the other features (quantity and a steerable antenna) became requirements to have a functional system.
    lxgr · 1790270542 · focus · HN ↗
    Altitude does impose a lower bound for the number required for global coverage but they have much, much more than geometrically needed. Iridium gets by with about 70 and is only marginally higher.
    As for steered terminals, you actually only really need these once you have more than one satellite visible in the sky at the same time. Without that, they’re purely a power efficiency feature.
3. dfox · 1790250007 · focus · HN ↗
  Note that this list is list of places where if you are enterprise starlink customer SpaceX can provide you with physical ethernet port to plug your cable into when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet. That is kind of obscure service that even land-based PLMN operators offer but usually do not document in this way in publicly available documentation.
  From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
  1. alexfoo · 1790251697 · focus · HN ↗
    None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.
    SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
    Here's an example in the UK: <a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A
    It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
    SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
    (I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
    hdgvhicv · 1790266854 · focus · HN ↗
    I used to have private peering with a satelite provider at telehouse, one which downlinked from GEO in Amsterdam and presented traffic direct. They simply backhauled it over their own network (tagged as mpls I guess). Indeed it would arrive on that link even when downlinked on other stations around the globe.
    agsnu · 1790356409 · focus · HN ↗
    Rainham is East of Telehouse.
    DaWelter · 1790948433 · focus · HN ↗
    Some recently deployed Starlink ground stations appear to be larger, i.e. more radomes in the physical cluster of radomes, than alexfoo's linked 3x3 cluster nr Winchester. Here's 10 at Woodwalton hr Huntingdon with space for another 14 ( <a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/e5uQKSypeqUXEaVq8" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/e5uQKSypeqUXEaVq8 ).
    I've recently seen images of Starlink sites closer to the equator that comprise as many as 40 radomes, I expect that's a geographic thing with more Starlink satellites in equatorial, low inclination, orbits.
    The dishes at Telehouse South are (more or less) statically directed south for GEO satellites over the equator. The Starlink antennas use smaller reflectors inside the radomes for ~Ku~ Ka band service and they're continually tracking satellites from horizon to horizon.
  2. account42 · 1790252145 · focus · HN ↗
    > when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet
    Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
    bluGill · 1790254541 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that more sensible?
    Very much depends on your applications. Some critical communications you don't want to trust to the internet at all. Some communication latency is important and so you can save a few MS by locating in such a data center. Some communication takes a lot of bandwidth and both of you want a cache in the data center to avoid use of the large pipes (youtube for example has servers in various colocation points just to cache the popular videos). Many small/medium businesses don't have a good data center, they outsource that to someone else, and starlink is just as good as anyone else (check all the fine print on the contract to see if this is true for your needs)
    I haven't checked recently, but the FBI/CIA (I'm not sure which, but probably both) had 4-5 completely isolated networks, no connection to any other network. Once a computer was connected to an isolated network it would be destroyed when the lifespan was up - thus ensuring that classified data could not leak off the network. When they needed to connect to other locations they bought a separate fiber connection the entire way - the fiber would be in the same bundle as internet traffic, but otherwise isolated. (There are several cases where a virus got onto such a network despite the isolation so this isn't perfect, but...)
    account42 · 1790321456 · focus · HN ↗
    It's more sensible if your goal is to not go "directly to the internet" which was the original statet motivation I replied to and also what I'd expect to cover most use cases. If you have additional requirements then sure something else might make more sense.
    addaon · 1790259434 · focus · HN ↗
    That depends if the goal of handling your own traffic is integrity (which a VPN can give you) or availability (which requires dedicated pathing through a leased line).
    someonebaggy · 1790260574 · focus · HN ↗
    Why is that more sensible? It's worse, more expensive and has more moving parts. The only reason you'd use a VPN is if you're small enough that Starlink won't give you a PNI, or you can't afford it.
4. aaron695 · 1790252547 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
5. bauruine · 1790260106 · focus · HN ↗
  Those arent't ground stations these are datacenters where Starlink has a pressence for peering with other ISPs.
  The ground stations look like this. <a href="https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/1280w/o-dpr-2/2aa021.webp" rel="nofollow">https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/1280w/o-dpr-2/2aa021.we...
6. dhx · 1790263374 · focus · HN ↗
  The site that was attacked is almost certainly located at 51.86428N 20.92121E (WGS84).
  I am surprised to learn from both satellite and street view imagery that this site is located just <50m off a public road (in clear line of sight) and within a residential backyard partly behind the house on the block, and protected by a 1.2-1.5m high white picket fence. To be fair, the lack of almost any visible security deterrent may perhaps scare off an attacker because... security surely wouldn't be that non-existent? My only other thought is these sites really do not matter to Starlink because Starlink will have 1000's of them and as they only process encrypted data, almost anyone can run a ground station for a small reimbursement per month if they've got semi-decent fibre connectivity and a bit of power?

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