| Thank you for the steer to that article, it has some errors. ECN is not in use at starlink (yet), so far as I can tell. The AQM in place just uses conventional - and timely - packet drop, which is the principal signal for congestion control across the internet. (so I would say " alternatively" in the Wikipedia article about ECN, and drop principally) To this day, so many people (including the early engineers at starlink), do not get that dropping packets is how we manage latency across it for greedy flows. I have given so many talks about how this works - lose 2 minutes of your life to this, please: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWViGcBlnm0&t=995s Starlink folk now deeply get that buffering for 100s of Ms is counter productive, and have put in play many "bufferbloat" mitigations over the past year, focusing on P99 metrics in particular. ... More importantly than AQM, their stuff does "flow isolation" and "Fair queuing" so that fat flows interfere with lighter weight flows less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_queuing The starlink wifi now does fq_codel in particular, which combines fair (flow) queuing with the codel AQM. While I do not have any benchmarks of their implementation it should show up on tests where two or more stations are trying to "do stuff" at the same time. ... There has been a lot of hype about ECN lately (because it does not require dropping packets) but it needs to be enabled at the endpoints, and at the congested routers in-between running an AQM algorithm that also has it turned on. I do keep hoping more enable it on their OSes (apple has it on for some sites, Apple Quic does now), and more routers enable it also. Stunningly widely supported is RFC3168 ECN across 68% or so of all websites, but few clients turn it on. Here's how you can try it: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Enable_ECN... If you have a supported router leveraging SQM ( on any tech, fiber, docsis, what have you) : https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... I note that ECN has some major drawbacks vs a vs drop - a bad guy can abuse it, in particular, which is in part why it is not on by default. If |
You dropped a thought