Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would we expect faster than fibre?
The speed of light in a vacuum is roughly 50% higher than the speed of light in fiber.
Is attenuation in a vacuum also better?
Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
41–50 of 469 posts
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#42So which points are getting “faster than fibre” latency because of this? Extra distance up and down, but make up for it on the long-haul. Won’t beat HF radio though.
Optical fiber has an index of refraction of around 1.6, so signals travel at around 0.6c. For a perfectly straight cross-continental link (5,000km) with no delays from amplification/retransmission, that's about 26 milliseconds. Assuming the satellites are directly overhead, Starlink adds another 500km up and down, making the minimum possible latency around 20 milliseconds. The real number might be slightly higher or lower depending on the location of the satellites.
My guess is the real latency depends mostly on the latency of relay nodes (either satellites or routers on earth), not the medium through which signals travel.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#43Are they using Mynaric technology?
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a serious question? You think SpaceX developed the industry-leading orbital rocket, launched hundreds of times to deliver thousands of in-house developed satellites utilizing homegrown, novel argon gas ion thrusters, to develop a global satellite internet system using inter-satellite laser links, their own in-house developed, incredibly inexpensive phased array antenna system, and everything else, and they fo…
This is HN. Everyone here is more intelligent, capable and aware than people who are industry professionals in their specific field.
It's the same sort as those watching the game at the pub who know more than the team's manager.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#45So which points are getting “faster than fibre” latency because of this? Extra distance up and down, but make up for it on the long-haul. Won’t beat HF radio though.
That could already be the case. Round trip time to the ~500km orbit is about 4 milliseconds (+ all other network elements before, after and in between). They claim to have a >5000km link running for significant time. Now think of a fibre link of that length and how many repeaters / routers will be needed due to attenuation and physical constraints. I can clearly see a path where Starlink laser links could be a viable…
a few random outages which happened near places some oligarch's yacht has visited recently and it'll become the priority backhaul.
I see folks in the Pentagon doing a collective /phew that this project is online in the next decade, multiple times.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
so you are asking if the traffic is additionally encrypted? i don't think that additional encryption is needed, like your ISP doesn't additionally encrypt your TLS encrypted traffic, that would be waste of resources
Metadata (src/dest ip/port) can be of high value, especially for cross-border traffic.
You mean in between two satellites?
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#47[flagged]
Is this a serious question? You think SpaceX developed the industry-leading orbital rocket, launched hundreds of times to deliver thousands of in-house developed satellites utilizing homegrown, novel argon gas ion thrusters, to develop a global satellite internet system using inter-satellite laser links, their own in-house developed, incredibly inexpensive phased array antenna system, and everything else, and they fo…
"industry-leading" [citation needed]
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#48[flagged]
the DoD and the NSA surely looked closely in the past couple of years. not least because their Russian and Chinese counterparts for sure are trying to look closely, too, especially in the past couple years.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#49> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link > Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke. How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link qua…
> (Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector) It's incredible really. I remember when I was a kid living with my mom on an island, we got broadband relatively late (compared to the rest of the country), as the island required antennas for getting mainland and the island linked, instead of cables. I think it was set up that way because of costs or something, remember i…
In some important ways space is actually the least hostile environment. But yeah, it’s still amazing and has its own challenges.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#50[flagged]
And this is what mind control looks like