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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

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Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#381

Post by vardump »

londons_explore wrote: post #342
ancientworldnow wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This obviously has no relevance for starlink which does not have local datacenters for cdn purposes. All that bandwidth is going through the satellites right before it reaches the user.

I wouldn't be surprised if starlink doesn't at least experiment with making the satellites a big bunch of CDN nodes. Imagine they put 10TB of flash memory on the satellites and run virtual machines for the big CDN companies (cloudflare, Google, Netflix etc). I reckon that 10TB is still big enough to service a good little chunk of internet traffic.

I guess the problem is that most of the useful bits of that 10 TB are going to be most of the time somewhere far away from the target audience.

You have to share that 10 TB with everything on that satellite's orbit.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#382

Post by Brybry »

panick21_ wrote: post #368
Brybry wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to historical Nielsen data[1] from 1991 to 2009: most Americans. Even back to 1950, for per household data, it was above 4 hours. [1] https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2009/average-tv-viewing-for...

Thats per household, not per person. That's different. And households also tended to get smaller.

The 1991 data and on was 4+ hours per person (older than 2). 7-8 hours per household.

They didn't have per person for the 1950 to 1990 data, only household (pdf in the link).

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#383

Post by actionfromafar »

psd1 wrote: post #372
beejiu wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that Starlink always "landed" to a base station back in the same jurisdiction? I think relaying through space could open a regulatory can of worms.

What kind of worms?

Bypassing spying, geofencing and other regulatory stuff, perhaps? Also curious what the can of worms might be.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#384

Post by madaxe_again »

karim79 wrote: post #283

Has anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it's a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home, and have had trouble with since day one. I won't mention any names (but I will say that it sounds a bit like Smodabone). What is the latency like? The variability of the up/down? Does it do what it says on the tin? Is (non-professional) online gaming a go?

My experience, a year of use - 300Mbps down pretty consistently, 40Mbps up, 40-60ms latency, fine for gaming for the most part, and the drop outs are unnoticeable short when they do infrequently happen. Never had an outage more than 10 seconds.

They’ve also nearly halved the price since I signed up.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#385

Post by robbiep »

loceng wrote: post #362
hasoleju wrote: post #327

I just noticed that they were launching their first satellites in 2019. It's impressive that they are now able to casually talk about the different routing options for the data streams to remote areas just 5 years after that. At first this sounded like an utopian dream but now it looks like common infrastructure that has a place in everyones life. This must have been the same feeling when the first landlines were ins…

I think it's likely a bad idea at this point to bet against Elon - he seems to make more good decisions than bad decisions, and is able to attract and keep the talent that is enabling his companies to snowball exponentially towards reaching the abundance of the universe. My deepest hope currently is that the riches of the universe now on the horizon of being relatively easily accessible, in a systematic and efficient…

Past performance is a piss poor indicator of future performance.

You can’t deny (I don’t think) that the things he’s done are amazing. He’s in the zone where he’s smelt too many of his farts though, and believes he can do no wrong, which is historically a very bad place to be. I hope, for all of the awesome things he’s said he’d like to do, that they don’t come agutsa due to that

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#386

Post by robbiep »

mlindner wrote: post #324
lucubratory wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge size of the network is itself a risk. Kessler syndrome is something everyone is currently trying to avoid, but if you wanted to intentionally induce it you could just start launching giant payloads of tiny ball bearings into their orbits, or take down enough of them that the shrapnel becomes equivalent to that anyway. Starlink is low enough that the debris from even a full Kessler syndrome cascade will deorb…

This is something commonly misunderstood. Kessler syndrome is a statistical process that happens over many years. It is not a sudden cascade like is seen in movies like Gravity. Statistical processes are not what militaries are interested in. It's actually thought that Kessler syndrome is kind of already happening right now, which is why there's a lot of push right now to try to de-orbit the very large pieces of debr…

Why can’t every satellite have a small rocket/firework like thing on the back pointing out to the expanse and if the power goes out or it doesn’t receive a signal from the dead man’s switch for long enough then it ignites? Even with a big mass you don’t need to give it much of a shove downwards in a zero friction environment to speed the de-orbit period up.

I’m sure I’m missing something but it just seems like a no brainer to make the deorbit process speed up with something relatively failsafe, as opposed to hopefully/maybe saving a bit of fuel to push it that way eventually

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#388

Post by Tade0 »

p1mrx wrote: post #314
mrb wrote: post #225

So that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is p…

The first slide says "9000+", suggesting that the number of space lasers is slightly over 9000. I feel like that's an important distinction.

Most likely it's a reference to the "it's over 9000!" meme.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#390

Post by FeepingCreature »

robbiep wrote: post #386
mlindner wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something commonly misunderstood. Kessler syndrome is a statistical process that happens over many years. It is not a sudden cascade like is seen in movies like Gravity. Statistical processes are not what militaries are interested in. It's actually thought that Kessler syndrome is kind of already happening right now, which is why there's a lot of push right now to try to de-orbit the very large pieces of debr…

Why can’t every satellite have a small rocket/firework like thing on the back pointing out to the expanse and if the power goes out or it doesn’t receive a signal from the dead man’s switch for long enough then it ignites? Even with a big mass you don’t need to give it much of a shove downwards in a zero friction environment to speed the de-orbit period up. I’m sure I’m missing something but it just seems like a no b…

Satellite failures often involve uncontrolled spinning. So you've turned a piece of debris in a known stable path that will eventually deorbit into a piece of debris on an unknown but potentially energetic orbit.

Satellites do have deorbit thrusters, but they're a lot more deliberate. I think Starlink have a whole separate remote controllable system just for deorbit control.

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