Cloudflare proposes new congestion-control tech for Starlink

When your internet router sits in your living room, it stays put. When it’s a satellite screaming across the sky at orbital velocity, the rules change. Cloudflare’s CTO Dane Knecht went public with a proposal for SpaceX’s Starlink team to co-develop congestion-control algorithms purpose-built for low-Earth orbit satellite networks, a technical challenge that’s becoming harder to ignore as Starlink’s user base balloons. Elon Musk reportedly passed the message along to the Starlink team, though no formal partnership has materialized. The problem with treating satellites like fiber Most of the internet runs on congestion-control algorithms like CUBIC, a protocol that manages how much data gets pushed through a connection at any given moment. CUBIC works well when conditions are predictable: stable routes, consistent latency, minimal packet loss. It was designed for terrestrial networks where the path between two points doesn’t fundamentally change every few minutes. LEO satellite networks break those assumptions in several ways. Starlink satellites orbit at roughly 550 kilometers above Earth, completing a full lap every 90 minutes or so. As a user’s connection hands off from one satel...