Lots of people have been asking me what I know about Starlink now that the beta roll-out is in motion and some in our community are now actively trying it out. My short answer has been, “not much”, since that’s a fact, though some folks are now reporting great speed results (that fluctuate fairly wildly).
Other info is that you’ll need about $500 in equipment to get started, with service costing about $100/month. Speeds up to 300Mbps down could become common after some upcoming network tweaking later in the year with 50 – 150Mbps download speeds and latency between 20 – 40ms reported even now in beta.
Additionally, I’ve just seen a reference to Google providing “operational support” on social media, so I decided to take a quick look at what that might mean. This article from Data Center Frontier discloses something fascinating:
SpaceX will locate Starlink ground stations within Google data center properties, providing single-hop access between Starlink customers and Google Cloud infrastructure. While SpaceX Starlink beta customers have access to Google Cloud today through Starlink’s existing set of network connections, establishing direct connections between the SpaceX low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation and Google Cloud reduces latency and improves performance, especially when it comes to real-time communications such as voice and video.
Google Cloud Connects to SpaceX Starlink, Will Host Ground Sations at Data Centers, Data Center Frontiers, 13 May 2021
What could be better than Google data center properties hosting Starlink’s ground stations? Er, unless you don’t really trust Google not to behave like Google.
But other than that, what’s not to like?
If you’re not familiar with some of Google’s shift in the last decade or so from archiving data to small tweaks that govern which data is available to whom, then maybe funneling literally all of Starlink’s network traffic through a Google-shaped funnel is a non-issue with you. But what if Google takes an algorhythmically-active role in shaping which data you’re able to access on the internet and which data you’re not able to access?
It might be likened to the odd little predicament of all the world knowing about Chinese hero “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square kerfuffle of 1989 that is almost entirely unknown to the average Chinese citizen via effective censorship. And that’s the problem with effective censorship, no? When done effectively, the recipients of such censorship have no idea what has been kept from them. This was made awkwardly clear to me on my first trip to mainland China with a client. We were meeting with some rapid-tooling manufacturers to get a project ready for regulatory testing, and this client brought up the Tiananmen Square violence of decades before with these manufacturers only to be met with odd silence. These people had no idea what he was talking about! Why not? Because they’d never read the news or seen the famous image below. Why not? Because censorship in China was nearly perfect, effectively burying any record of this historic incident to Chinese citizenry. Effective censorship is not detectable, so victims of such censorship have no idea what’s been hidden from them!
Might Google have this same power of censorship with Starlink customers when all their internet communication is channeled through their own servers? After all, if the entirety of your internet pipeline runs through Google hardware, if we posit Google has the capacity (and will) to tweak/modify/filter/censor what flows through their infrastructure, then how would you ever find out what they are tweaking about the information you’ve got access to via your connection to the internet? Apart from some external reference point, you’d never know.
In the end, doesn’t this come down to trust? How much should you trust Google to “do no evil”? If the information you obtain through the internet is already pre-censored, how will you ever know that? Further, at that point, wouldn’t “truth” be whatever Google says it is? Isn’t it already that?
So, what’s a Starlink user to do? I’d suggest looking into a VPN service that will allow you to have end-to-end encryption from your computer/tablet/phone directly to the end-point server (web site) you’re attempting to access. In theory, at least, this will keep any Google snooping at bay, since all information traveling from your computer to the end-point server will be fully encrypted, and therefore non-decipherable by any third party wishing to do any snooping. One such VPN service I like is Surfshark, since they’re reasonably-priced and they allow installation for paying subscribers to install their apps on multiple devices. Very nice for protecting PCs, tablets, phones, whatever, at a reasonable price.
There’s more to information security than just using a VPN, so do your own homework on the types associated with whatever you’re doing, or contact us for more details on how to bolster security for your particular uses.
*Edited for clarity 210515 and 210517. Edit 230110 for solution to securing connection beyond Google hardware issues.