Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by treffer » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 6:54 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #210

foobiekr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a clear cut, and one intended application of Starlink was . You need less detours and light in fiber is slower than light in vacuum.

Fiber slows down Berlin NYC by a lot. I usually use Wolfram Alpha for this and it's like 30ms fiber vs. 21ms vacuum.

So in theory starling could offer less hops and better latency. The detour to space isn't that bad either, ~1100km on a 6500km route, and fiber will need some extra hops and detours too.

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

#222

Post by throwaway744678 » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 7:22 AM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #200

gpm wrote: 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?

Or 1 million people sold $1 worth of Apple. If you want to execute a large trade, you'd probably have to buy from several sellers, and (my limited understanding of the market is that) you'd do so by matching sell orders in ascending order, thus pushing the market value up.

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

#223

Post by dermesser » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 7:45 AM UTC

bcrl wrote: post #143

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference between open air laser and microwave links is that one of them doesn't require licensed spectrum. The costs of doing it will be much lower.

I'm sure regulators will start regulating the 1550nm spectrum once they realize they can start making money off free space optics.

Right, because there's no reason at all to regulate a shared medium like RF bands except to make money.

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

#224

Post by throwaway_dhv7k » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:12 AM UTC

The need to hide cables under water exists, among other things, because satellites will be the first thing that will fly down in the event of a global conflict. Of course, underwater cables also have their vulnerabilities, but at least the technology for repairing them and laying new ones is much simpler than satellites.

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

#225

Post by nerdponx » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:24 AM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #206

gnopgnip wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Excess rent" is economics jargon for something akin to "selling something for more than its fair value". The idea with "rent-seeking" is therefore that of seeking opportunities to take advantage of or even create market distortions that work in your favor, allowing you to capture a greater share of surplus value than you would otherwise obtain in a theoretically-fair market.

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

#226

Post by martin8412 » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:38 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #49

nottorp wrote: 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.

most places in North America outside dense urban cores*

But sure let's fill up space with junk because North America can't get their shit together and just deploy fiber.

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

#227

Post by thworp » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:42 AM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #174

cycomanic wrote: post #120

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…

Since you seem to have some experience I want to ask:

How much latency is added by routing and switching on a typical transatlantic journey?

And a followup, are there any promising developments for moving the networking infrastructure fully to light as a carrier signal without any electron-based hardware in between?

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

#228

Post by hyperionplays » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:51 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #198

foobiekr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Each submarine cable is 12+ strands which are DWDM multiplexed to 20-40 channels at 100-400gbps. Being able to pump 40 terabits per second up to a satellite from a single uplink, as they hope, is significant-- exceeding most subocean cables.

Preface: Day job is owning a low latency telco.

a single cable system under construction(which we are buying part of) (there are over 30) has over 120t of capacity @400G waves, but we are already discussing doing 800G waves, which will double that. We currently operate on over 7 submarine cables, one of the landing stations we operate out of has over 10 cable landing which is over 850T of capacity across all cables.

Most of my metro DF backhaul can push 16-19T down a single pair, and most of my builds are 1728 core fiber.

Starlink is very cool, it will connect ALOT of under served or simply not served people across the world, but the notion that it will even have the slightest chance at dinting the Subsea cable market is laughable.

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

#229

Post by eqvinox » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 9:06 AM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #207

eqvinox wrote: post #153

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…

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.

Funnily enough that part is completely absent in the official French version… it's just "Fédérale" there… and shouldn't any of DE, FR or IT be valid as a "source" for a Swiss to English translation? So if you choose to do FR→EN, it's just "federal polytechnic institute"…

(… to be fair, yes, "Fédérale" translates to "eidgenössisch" when the source is known to be Swiss French / fr_CH, but still. Oh the joys of locale details and translating natural language…)

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

#230

Post by eqvinox » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 9:14 AM UTC

dermesser wrote: post #211

looofooo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH Lausanne or Zürich?

I know about two newspapers who regularly say "ETH Lausanne", and I suspect these articles are written by similar pedants as some commenters here appear to be.

My original motivation in posting was really to spread the understanding that ETHZ and EPFL are sibling institutions; I knew both institutions from some comp sci bits but never made the connection until a while ago. And then I noticed a bunch of other people didn't connect them either…

(I mean, it's not super important to understand these two are related, but honestly I feel like it makes them even more impressive. ETHZ already has a MIT-like reputation, with EPFL not far behind. The Swiss are clearly doing something right with their technical universities. And it's a 100% quota too, these two are the only ETHs/EPFs.)