[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Of course, I meant "every default-free router".

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 16-May-26 08:37, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> 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.