Live data from Hacker News

Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

techxplore.com

201–210 of 268 posts

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#201
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I a (hypothetical) very low frequency value based trader buy a million dollars worth of Apple. Apple should go up in price slightly, because someone (me) just made a big bet that it's going to do well. The market does this automatically. TSMC should also go up in price very slightly, because Apple doing well makes it more likely that TSMC (a major vendor of theirs) will also do well, and the market just learn…

But for you to buy a million dollars worth of Apple, someone sold a million dollars worth of Apple, right?

[deleted]

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#202
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be about reducing latency between these two exchanges to enable arbitrage opportunities the way I understood it.

Exactly. IEX exchange is relatively new, and their big innovation is that they use long spools of fiberoptic wire to delay their user's connections, thus creating an even playing field. https://www.sec.gov/files/07feb18_hu_iex_becoming_an_exchang... "The reduction in trading costs (spreads) is broadly consistent with recent theories on how speed advantages may be used to exploit mechanical arbitrage opportunities. Th…

How does it create a level playing field?

Everyone gets the same treatment. Everyone is delayed the same amount.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#203
post #49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how great that is for consumer bandwidth (50Mbps) 50 Mbps is great consumer bandwidth where?

In most places where you can't economically get a fiber. That is, in most places outside dense urban cores. They are petty numerous in the US.

Laugh from rural area via fiber

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#204

They transmit in near infrared in an environment that is full of particles, wouldn't this cause light pollution in a spectrum many animals would be impacted by? Also, doesn't this have the issue that anything passing through the beam cuts off internet? A bird, a kite, a malicious actor, a dust storm?

Laser is for satellite to satellite communication so far.

I don't know of any birds or bikes flying around up in space. :D

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#205

Current fiber optic cables transmit signals at 2/3rds the speed of light. Modeling has shown that starlink's laser backbone would allow it to beat deep-sea cables in some situations. This article estimates a NYSE -> FTSE reduction from 76ms to 43ms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a HFT bidding war going on. https://archmeregreenarch.org/1456/news/starlink-and-the-ris... There is a newer version of fib…

Am I the only one who thinks HFT should be forbidden? Stocks and investments are a nice thing to have, since you can buy a share of a company you believe in, they get the money, do stuff, you get dividends and in the end can sell the stock after some time too. HFT changes these "beliefs in company" to "beliefs that the stock will go up", and the timeframe of those "beliefs" is sometimes in milliseconds. This turns cl…

I am pretty sure HFT is the only reason the average joe can trade in the first place and can definitely say that X's stock is worth Y price. Otherwise you would have to trust the broker to give you a correct estimate.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's rent-seeking HFT?

Rent-seeking is an "economic activity to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity". Or put another way it means societies resources are put towards wealth transfer instead of productivity/wealth creation.

Thank you; understood. I've just looked at the Wikipedia definition[0] as well, which is a little different, but I get the point you're making.

I haven't thought about this enough, but one thing I'd note is that HFT is risk-taking, and taking a risk generally has the possibility of profit or loss.

A second thing would be that the phrase "society's resources" is a bit dangerous, as it might let us think that the money they're using is somehow everyone's money. When in fact they're spending their money on this, hoping to make a profit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#207

I like the ETH result and it is an impressive feat (I know some people involved in that work). That said the article is a lot of rubbish. First there is the weird focus on lasers, all (relevant) Optical Communication uses lasers, including fibre comms. Then they make it sound like this is to replace fibre, again rubbish. The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatell…

(really off-topic) The Z on ETHZ is important, ETH on its own is just (loosely) "university", the Z makes it the Zürich one ;D. There is exactly one other: EPFL in Lausanne. (And you can technically call them EPFZ and ETHL if you really want to confuse people.) (EPF [École Polytechnique Fédérale] is just the French version of German ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule]. Funnily enough both have pretty good inte…

Continuing with the off-topic, the E in ETH is pretty significant if you're going to loosely translate, as it stands for "Swiss federal", which is a big part of where those institutions' standing comes from.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#208

I like the ETH result and it is an impressive feat (I know some people involved in that work). That said the article is a lot of rubbish. First there is the weird focus on lasers, all (relevant) Optical Communication uses lasers, including fibre comms. Then they make it sound like this is to replace fibre, again rubbish. The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatell…

Even if it becomes possible it's a recipe for disaster, we'll lose a lot of mission critical systems of sorts in the event of a bad solar flare.

There aren't too many common natural disasters that could take out a huge fraction of undersea cables in one go.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(really off-topic) The Z on ETHZ is important, ETH on its own is just (loosely) "university", the Z makes it the Zürich one ;D. There is exactly one other: EPFL in Lausanne. (And you can technically call them EPFZ and ETHL if you really want to confuse people.) (EPF [École Polytechnique Fédérale] is just the French version of German ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule]. Funnily enough both have pretty good inte…

...yet, when saying "ETH" everyone knows what is being referred to. Except for crypto bros.

ETH Lausanne or Zürich?

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#210

I like the ETH result and it is an impressive feat (I know some people involved in that work). That said the article is a lot of rubbish. First there is the weird focus on lasers, all (relevant) Optical Communication uses lasers, including fibre comms. Then they make it sound like this is to replace fibre, again rubbish. The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatell…

The article is 100% rubbish. Just complete trash. Each submarine cable is 12+ strands which are DWDM multiplexed to 20-40 channels at 100-400gbps. The entire _planned_ starlink constellation has less aggregate switching capacity than a pair of current generation core routers. The market for terrestrial ethernet _routed_ 400Gbps ports is 10k+ annually and 800Gbps is just getting warmed up. Satellite is not going to ev…

Isn’t the latency of satellite internet always going to be significantly worse? Unless, of course, you could make larger hops, avoiding unnecessary switching delays. But I don’t think that will happen, except some rare circumstances.
Post reply on HN