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. 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.

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