NAN131: Routing Through Space: The Reality of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Networks

Eric Cho (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to the Network Animation Nerds Podcast, where we explore the latest network animation from a practitioner's perspective. I'm your host, Eric Cho, a network engineer who loves everything about network animation.

Joining us today is Sid Mathur, founder and lead engineer at Fastah. Sid has built a career obsessing over data networks, system performance, and the operational challenges facing ISPs and satellite operators. Following his fantastic talk at Nanak97, he's here to unpack the real-world implications of low-Earth orbit, Leo Internet, dive into the weeds of in-motion geolocation, and explore the traffic routing implications when your users are moving across the globe in one session. Sid, welcome to the show.

Sid Mathur (0:53)

Great to have you here. Thank you, Eric. My honor.

Eric Cho (0:57)

Yeah, so we have been really interested, we as a network engineer in general, have been interested in this Leo Internet, right? Like I know I messed up the pronunciation. So low-Earth orbit Internet, just to once and for all to correct that. Can you tell us a little bit about what those are? Just, you know, I mean, space networking is very general. So let's talk about Leo satellite in particular.

Sid Mathur (1:24)

So, Leo satellite networking is the newest class of ISPs. To use a common lingo, we all understand, which is Internet service provider.

Eric Cho (1:33)

Yeah.

Sid Mathur (1:33)

And historically, geostationary satellites have been the exotic way to get Internet access in far off remote areas. And historically, that has also been a very expensive technology that only the richest corporations could use, or the military could use, right? So, low Earth orbit ISPs are a new class of Internet access, which is using satellites in low Earth orbit, like you said, which actually traverse the sky above you at intervals of a few tens of seconds. So, they move across the horizon from a point that you are standing at, on the face of the Earth, very quickly. And your traffic bounces off those moving satellites very quickly too. And the radio layer, the design of the dish that talks to these satellites, all of it is optimized for not just remote access, the way geostationary satellites have historically allowed themselves to be used for. But it has allowed much larger surface area of the Earth to be covered with high speed. And just because these satellites are not that high up above in the sky, the latencies that you can achieve are much smaller than what geostationary satellites were able to achieve historically. So a lot of the physics of electromagnetic physics, basically of how much power do you need, that has reduced a lot because the satellites are much lower up in the sky.

So the radio part has improved, hence the speeds have improved. And by scale of global deployment, you are able to offer a residential B2C, as we call it, business to consumer. So only Shell Corporation will not buy it, or the US Department of Defense will not be the only entity that buys it. It is for the common man or woman. So cheaper price points, global access, it is a multi-country ISP arrangement by default. So it is not your Comcast or Verizon who's strong in half the country of a large nation.

So the way of thinking about these ISPs is global first, and it's high speed, and it's not your geostationary, pokey, slow, text-only link anymore.

Eric Cho (4:02)

Yeah. And if we were to overlay any companies that are offering this, I mean, I know you're talking about this economic barrier from before and after, also the technology advancements. But if we were to just to overlay commercial companies who are offering it, like if I have a credit card tomorrow, I want to buy it, would this be like SpaceX or Starlink or Amazon, Kuiper, what are those commercial companies?

Sid Mathur (4:29)

Correct. So Starlink has been live for a couple of years now. There have been, according to Netflix's data, because Netflix again is a global media powerhouse. They're only like five countries where they are not in service, which is a massive global footprint.

So Netflix's own data categorizes them as the world's 10th largest ISP about nine months ago, and they have grown phenomenally since then. So they're probably by volume of subscribers, probably in the top five of Netflix user base by now. So large streaming companies are seeing Mathur aggregate global adoption of Starlink. So Starlink is definitely the incumbent at this moment in time. And like you said, Kuiper was the or name for Amazon's project. It's called Amazon Leo now.

So they just took the leo word and they made it a lowercase leo. And they filed a trademark application for it. I don't know whether Amazon Leo is a USPTO blessed trademark, but so it is. So the new brand name is Amazon Leo.