Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 edition of the Sands and the Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from the very cold Jacksonville, Florida.

Well, today I wrote a quick article about geolocation and Starlink.

Now, the reason this is an issue is that a lot of

websites networks are implementing geo-fencing, where they are either blocking access from

various geographic locations or display different content. Satellite networks have always been problematic.

Traditional satellite internet providers have a few often geostationary,

satellites that cover a large part of the globe.

As a result, the IP address is often only very weakly linked to a particular

location. Starlink is a little bit different in that respect. Starlink has these

thousands of low Earth orbit satellites. Each satellite only covers a fairly small area on the globe, and Starling also maintains a large number of ground stations that will then receive signals from satellites that are just currently covering that particular part of the globe.

So it's going from the user to the satellite and then

often right back to a ground station. Now, Starlink has the option to route traffic between

satellites, but that's often only utilized. Well, if you're trying to, for example, route

around outages or maybe for ocean-faring vessels,

where, of course, there is no close-by ground station.

The other thing that Starlink does is when you're looking at the public IP address,

and Starlink does use the usual carrier crate NAT for its users.

And I'm talking about sort of the consumer users here.

The IP address that's being assigned to a particular user, the public IP address,

reverse resolves to an host name that actually includes the location of the particular ground station.

It typically covers at least the country, the particular traffic originates from.

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