from Hacker News

Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to 'improve Wi-Fi'?

by pulisse on 3/18/25, 5:59 PM with 5 comments

  • by symbolicAGI on 3/18/25, 6:46 PM

    Starlink provides high bandwidth plus low latency for international connections. The low latency occurs because once the origin TCP packets reach the low orbit Starlink network, they can be almost single-hopped to the destination continent before downlinked to the user's Starlink antenna. Land based routers take 10 ms or so per hop and there are many on an international connection.

    The White House property Wifi dead spots would be best improved separately by a commodity secured mesh network.

    For example, Google Fiber Austin to Israel (land based router hops): 1 _gateway (192.168.1.1) 1.162 ms 1.155 ms 1.191 ms 2 [redacted] 3.077 ms 3.054 ms 3.035 ms 3 * * * 4 * * * 5 * * * 6 ae1.pr02.dfw101.googlefiber.net (192.119.17.142) 8.666 ms 7.731 ms 7.698 ms 7 * * 141.101.74.42 (141.101.74.42) 9.144 ms 8 * * * 9 * * 104.18.28.18 (104.18.28.18) 9.160 ms

  • by beardyw on 3/18/25, 7:11 PM

    Perhaps the president has a big red glowing internet on/off button. But if it's off, how can he keep up with the his news? Answer: Starlink!

    [PS I do know how the internet works]

  • by ttyprintk on 3/18/25, 6:34 PM

  • by sjsdaiuasgdia on 3/18/25, 6:23 PM

    Corruption.