How does Starlink work for IP address/ASN internationally?
I was curious how Starlink would work when connected in international locations? Would it show a US IP address? Would it show a Starlink ISP ASN?
For comparision - cell phone tethering plans, you can be "anywhere" in the world, but the roaming telcom provider will (lack of a better word) "tunnel" your connection to your local telcom so you could be in China, France, UK but you would have the country of origin IP address/telcom provider ASN? E.g. T-Mobile from USA, but in Europe would show that you're either in California or Kansas.
So, bit of digging, StarLink's ASN is 14593 [1]. They show as having 302 V4 blocks and 59 V6 blocks of space [2]. Some of that space (well, most) looks to be GeoLocated in the US, but some show as other countries. Same with the V6 blocks [3]. My guess is that each V4 block is assigned to a given country or Geo Location, and same with a larger V6. Given they use CGNAT, they wont need as much V4 blocks to split out. If you bring your device with you, it will show a new IP Address... Also, as of note, I have seen, at some stage, that it either shows Google's IP range, or that Google was announcing their blocks in Ireland at one stage... I dont have it myself, but did some digging when a someone i know got it...
[1]: https://bgp.he.net/AS14593
[2]: https://bgp.he.net/AS14593#_prefixes
[3]: https://bgp.he.net/AS14593#_prefixes6
Starlink says on their FAQ page[1] for the roaming model that if you roam too far, your connection will be briefly interrupted while they assign you a new IP address.
I think that's because they want every user to have a reasonable experience with all the websites out there that do geoIP lookups. It also gives them flexibility in the future to not act as a worldwide internet backbone for their own users traffic by advertising each set of local IP's only at local POP's.
[1]: https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/dhcp-config....
Personal experience, it assigns based on where you are connecting from, and it seems they use the lat/long to be precise, as I used it very near the French/Spanish border. It’s all behind CGNAT anyway, so I use a VPS as a VPN landing point so I can do port forwarding.
There’s also a substantial difference in performance depending on where you are - in Portugal, I get near 200Mbps, in Spain, 140, in France, 90.
I had an experience using Starlink at a hotel in the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan. Funnily enough, I only became aware of this after some websites began redirecting me to their German versions - turns out our traffic was being routed through a host with an IP from one of their STRLNK-POP-FRNTDEU1 pools. The list @mkimball linked to doesn't include Jordan, likely because the service hasn't been officially launched in the country. This also means that, for now, you can enjoy a truly anonymous VPN-less browsing experience out of there :)
I work for IPinfo.io. For geolocating satellite IP addresses, we use a combination of geofeed, rDNS hints etc. Starlink's geofeed data is easily accessible [0] which lists out geolocation information of their IP ranges. We use rDNS hints as well where you can find some geolocation hints from rDNS records.
[0] https://geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv
I can say that in my experience in western Canada it does show up as Canadian, but never in a city in my province. Generally either Winnipeg or Toronto where I assume they've got ground stations.
Why do you ask? Planning something?
Using starlink at mcmurdo station in Antarctica. The IP shows as Sydney, Australia.
I imagine if starlink uses local IP address range, it would be bound by local ISP rules. All sorts of censorship and filtering.
And avoiding local ISPs may be major reason to use Starlink!
> but the roaming telcom provider will "tunnel" your connection to your local telcom
+1, I came here out of curiosity to see what others have to say, but ended up learning something new about how roaming works.
Each block of IPs probably correspond to a ground station. Your data is probably mostly routed to the closest ground station.
For much of our time in Canada this summer we had a US IP address on Starlink (Seattle PoP).