Followup news: "Man with a drone caused intermitten internet outage lasting hours"
Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
231–240 of 268 posts
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
That Starlink estimate must be low, they currently have 1.5 million customers and a significant percentage of total bandwidth is over ocean and thus mostly wasted. If you assume a pessimistic 100x over subscription and 50% waste over oceans and non serviced countries * 50mbps (upload + download) * 1.5 million customers that’s well over 1.5 TBPs current capacity for customers which then doubles when you include their…
Does it count as a waste if their main selling point is to deliver internet access to places that are hard or impossible to reach otherwise?
Well you're calculating bandwidth so yes
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How do HFT firms create market distortions that work in their favour?
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
HFT isn't even that harmful. What's harmful is brokerages that hold large portions of financial instruments who take advantage of customers' live buying and selling with delayed swaps, intentional front running, etc. This is how the stock market was bullied before HFT, options markets, trading bots, etc enabled 'everyone' to do skeezy arbitrage and not just market makers. The only meaningful way to limit the efficacy…
Wouldn’t a financial transaction tax be the friction required? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax
Yes.
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
How do HFT firms create market distortions that work in their favour?
I'm not making the assertion, I am just trying to clarify the terminology.
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it count as a waste if their main selling point is to deliver internet access to places that are hard or impossible to reach otherwise?
Well you're calculating bandwidth so yes
But Starlink would have no reason to exist in the first place if it didn't offer service in those remote places.
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#237Earlier 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…
That Starlink estimate must be low, they currently have 1.5 million customers and a significant percentage of total bandwidth is over ocean and thus mostly wasted. If you assume a pessimistic 100x over subscription and 50% waste over oceans and non serviced countries * 50mbps (upload + download) * 1.5 million customers that’s well over 1.5 TBPs current capacity for customers which then doubles when you include their…
You are underestimating the capacity of modern core routers.
A single PTX10016 router could route the entire starlink customer base with no over-subscription at all (230 Tbit/s vs 75 Tbit/s from 50 Mbit/s * 1.5M).
Actual estimates of the total capacity of Starlink puts it more in the 20Tbit/s range (and that's without taking into account coverage over less populated areas).
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
That Starlink estimate must be low, they currently have 1.5 million customers and a significant percentage of total bandwidth is over ocean and thus mostly wasted. If you assume a pessimistic 100x over subscription and 50% waste over oceans and non serviced countries * 50mbps (upload + download) * 1.5 million customers that’s well over 1.5 TBPs current capacity for customers which then doubles when you include their…
You are underestimating the capacity of modern core routers. A single PTX10016 router could route the entire starlink customer base with no over-subscription at all (230 Tbit/s vs 75 Tbit/s from 50 Mbit/s * 1.5M). Actual estimates of the total capacity of Starlink puts it more in the 20Tbit/s range (and that's without taking into account coverage over less populated areas).
First my 3 Tbit/s estimate was wildly pessimistic and only covered current network utilization. Adding missing countries plus ships more than doubles land area, 42,000 satellites is more than 10x current satellites, v2 is ~10x current individual satellite bandwidth. So current goals are at least 200x current bandwidth. (Satellites also so point to point links which we are ignoring in terms of what the total routing capacity of the network has.)
Total estimate for a “fully deployed” Starlink network is therefore 600 Tbit/s from my pessimistic estimate (or half that if your thinking in terms of customer bandwidth vs traffic handled by the network)
A more realistic estimate is more like 3,000 TBPs as lower density areas can offer higher bandwidth per customer a village of 100 in the Sahara gets the same bandwidth as a town of 100,000 in the US. How much of that actually gets used is a different story.
PS: Individual switches can handle a surprisingly large percentage of total internet bandwidth as packets travel through many of them. 100 switches / average of 4 hops per packet has 25x the bandwidth of a single switch.
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#239IMHO this article is garbage because moving internet backbone in space isn't a sustainable choice in the short, medium and especially long period. Starlink knows that, they are operating in loss, burning money of investors, hoping that some kind of new sci-fi tech will change the game, but honestly that won't happen. Image if the current cellphone network was in space, every time the tech has a generational step forward you should burn all the satellites and re- launch a new constellation. Moreover, you need to reach consumers (the last mile ) on Earth and you can't do that with lasers. Customers will rely in radio communications, that in this case have low quality compared to other alternatives, when they are available. In fact the point of satellite Internet is to cover a niche market: you use that solution if there are no alternative and if you can afford the costs. So you can accept lower connection speed, variale QoS, etc , hoping in a better alternative in the future and, when that alternative arrive in form of a wired traditional connection, instantly the customers migrate there. So that market constantly decrease, not increase. If competitors realise that exist clusters of satellite customers in some rural zones and they are willing to pay more for Internet connection they will take over completely and , anyway, in times of remote working, someone should invest in providing fast internet in remote places that are characteristic of better quality of life for remote workers want a better life, instead of invest in satellite internet. Laser telecommunications are already a thing but in optic fibre and there in fact they have more sense than in a fragile and expansive satellite constellation.
Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not any more than saying a "proper cloud" will disrupt satellite transmissions is meant to be serious. Is it a cirrus cloud? Is it a cumulus? A cumulonimbus? Which cloud is going to do this blocking?
A proper cloud. Everybody understood what he meant, including you. Why the need for such extreme pedantry? Oh right. It's HN, home of uber-pedants.
No. I still don’t know what is meant by a proper cloud. I don’t have a starlink, but I’ve had plenty of other satellite systems in the past. None of these have had issues with clouds. Severe storms with heavy rain and lightning would affect it at times. With the older large dishes, heavy winds could cause it to move enough to degrade image. Clouds by themselves? No, not an issue.
So, yet again I have to ask because all of the useless answers received to this point have not been an actual answer to what a proper cloud is that could interfere with a signal