@reillyusa
A hop-by-hop view of @Cloudflare network engineer @tstrickx crossing the Atlantic on Starlink Wi-Fi.
Over 8 hours and 7,000 km, Starlink handed off satellites every 15 seconds and carried traffic through 7 Cloudflare deployments. Each plane appears to keep its own IPv6 /56.
Over the ocean, inter-satellite lasers carried traffic to the nearest available ground station. Cloudflare’s anycast routing followed it, keeping traffic local as the plane moved at 40,000 feet and 500 knots.
- Ocean crossings use inter-satellite laser links until traffic can reach a ground station.
- Those laser routes appeared slower than fiber in this single test.
- Latency showed two distinct bands, possibly from first-packet dataplane setup.
- Ground-station selection changed during the flight, including a Canada-to-US switch near the border.
- Cloudflare’s anycast routing followed the ground station, not the plane’s source address. That kept traffic local without DNS-based steering.
starlink.ecmp.network/f/2026-11-02-b…View quoted post on X
job-boards.greenhouse.io Model Operations Lead, AI Gateway In-Office 
