[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[Brian E Carpenter]

> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with
> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4.

It's to do with the fact that if the rate of BGP4 updates increases
dramatically, as it would if we were trying to multihome tens of
millions of enterprises, they would still have to be propagated
at the speed of light. Moore's law could presumably provide for
storage and processing of those millions of BGP routes but only
after the updates make it to every default router. It's unclear
that BGP routing could ever converge at that scale. Tony Li
should be answering your question, not me, however.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 16-May-26 05:50, John Gilmore wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this
>> does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more
>> powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig.
> 
> This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light
> varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of
> delivery of packets.  Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and
> vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic
> cable covering a similar distance.
> 
> I suggest that Moore's Law is what distinguishes the NASA rockets of the
> 1960's era from SpaceX's reusable rockets of the 2020's.  Now they have
> complex processors throughout, and can manage hairy maneuvers
> themselves, most importantly a soft landing back on Earth.  This vastly
> reduces the cost of launching the Starlink satellites into orbit to
> catch and relay those packets, making the whole project economically
> feasible.  (Compare with the rapidly bankrupt Iridium effort, which used
> conventional rockets.)
> 
> And if you haven't seen how a Starlink base station works -- it's a
> triumph of Moore's Law.  The Starlink dish is a ~1,200-element phased
> array achieving ~33-34 dBi antenna gain, comparable to a 60 cm satellite
> TV dish but with electronic beam steering that can track satellites and
> execute handoffs in microseconds. SpaceX achieved consumer pricing
> through aggressive silicon integration (reducing beamformer chips from
> ~80 to ~6 between Gen 1 and Gen 3), hybrid PCB materials (mixing
> expensive RF laminates with cheap FR-4), and software-defined
> calibration. Manufacturing cost is estimated at ~$400.  See this
> analysis:
> 
>    https://abgoyal.com/posts/starlink-dish-rf-deep-dive/
> 
> 	John
> 
> PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with
> why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4.