How do Starlink IP addresses work with Geolocation? Does Starlink have access to IP address blocks for all coutnries and issue them out based on registration and/or GPS data? Or do all starlink customers worldwide get issued US IPs?
Starlink IPs are assigned to the closest ground station. I used Starlink during a transatlantic crossing. The first half of the trip our IP address was based in Madrid. At about 2/3 of the way it changed to a Virginia based IP. And as we got closer to the Caribbean a Miami based IP.
That would cause your active connections to break because the source IP changed entirely. Are you sure the IP changes abruptly, or they keep it for as long as the session is live? Though keeping the original IP would mean that, for example, if you are sailing around the world, you'd start getting worse and worse latency as all your data continues going to the original ground station which may be on the other side of the world at that point.
An interesting problem - I wonder what they truly do here. I suppose people expect interruptions with Starlink so doing an IP swap wouldn't be all that different to losing service due to obstruction for a few minutes.
IP addresses change all the time. It changes when connect to WiFi, it changes when enter new country, it changes when provider gives you new address. I cant tell if changes on mobile, it looks like mobile providers hand off to next tower, but there must be a limit of how far can go before routing breaks.
Everything retries cause there isn’t difference between new address or bad connection. Most of time we don’t notice cause not using device. Or because most connections are short lived.
I'm aware that the public IP changes when a phone (on which one hardly has much control over how things run anyway), switches from cellular to a WiFI network.
Your comments are more practical (and maybe aimed at a layman's use of Starlink) but I am talking about the theory of Starlink supposedly interrupting a perfectly-working connection in order to change your IP, which interrupts everything, by design of TCP/conntrack. Whether that operation is fatal or not due to retries or whatever else is not my point at all.
Also, ISPs at home don't randomly disconnect you to give you a new IP. They may give you a new IP when you disconnect and reconnect for other reasons, but they should never dump your connection on purpose just to give you a new IP for no reason. That's not good design at all, hence the question about how Starlink handles wanting to give you a new IP.
Who knows. I was busy sailing, cooking and fishing. One day my Google searches are Spanish prioritized, the next day they are American prioritized. Starlinks are relatively power hungry so we power it up, connect, gather weather and other tasks, and then power down.
What I do know is our IP changed depending on our geographic location.
Note that there's no such thing as "US IPs". GeoIP works by induction: "OK, this operator is in France, so all addresses in this range are probably in France; these ones are probably close to Paris, which is where this internal router is;" etc.
If I had to guess, you probably get the address of the base station whose signals reflect off the satellite, which is probably not very far from you, given the satellites are in LEO.
EDIT: I meant to say that you get an address in the ground station's subnetwork. I don't know if Starlink uses NAT.
GeoIP works by many different means. There are many different GeoIP databases which contain different data based on different opinions. Some are voluntarily reported, some by ping timings, some based on the registered address of the owner of the block of IPs, some based on business records, some based on third party reporting of other direct measurements, etc.
Sure there are. IP addresses assigned to an organization with a US address (typically by ARIN) are US IPs. Of course, there's nothing that requires those IPs to be used exclusively for destinations inside the US.
I hadnt even considered that there were multiple ground stations. I just assumed the Starlink satelites would just all bounce the signal back to base in the US.
Also, people in Europe don't want to have to take a round trip to space via America just to pull up IKEA's website hosted next door. That's a lot of pointless latency when you could bounce it down to a nearby ground station instead.
