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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

#91

Post by mensetmanusman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #6

> 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…

3M just invented a new fiber interconnect thing to mitigate the dust issue: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/inte...

Maybe the future of usb in 10 years :)

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

#92

Post by jonathankoren »

bee_rider wrote: post #79
colordrops wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've got a laptop with a terrabyte drive, it would be 42,000 full laptops worth of data.

Implementing a “comparable operation” to this satellite network using laptops instead is going to be really expensive fuel-wise, I think.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

-- Andrew Tannenbaum

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

#93

Post by edgyquant »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #38
edgyquant wrote: post #35

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.

The area between a starlink receiver on the ground and a satellite isn’t a vacuum

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

#94

Post by 7e »

jlmorton wrote: post #30
7e wrote: post #14

Global internet traffic is estimated to be 3 yottabytes per day. So Starlink is now carrying one of out every 77 million parts of worldwide traffic. Wow, that's small. EDIT: there's some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.

Where do you get 3 yottabytes? That is difficult to believe. I see 150 exabytes per month [1], about a thousand times less. https://gitnux.org/internet-traffic-statistics/ [1]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/216335/data-usage-per-mo...

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

#96

Post by moffkalast »

Scoundreller wrote: post #21
sandworm101 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking is an issue, but doppler can also be a thing. At orbital speed (actually up to 2x orbital speeds) the doppler effect between two satellites can change the frequency enough to cause interference. Moving a scope to track a moving target is one problem, allowing the algorithms to adapt at the frequency shifts on the fly another.

Indeed Iridium had to deal with the same thing (or I guess, didn’t): “ Cross-seam inter-satellite link hand-offs would have to happen very rapidly and cope with large Doppler shifts; therefore, Iridium supports inter-satellite links only between satellites orbiting in the same direction.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellat...

Don't all satellites orbit in the same direction? Launching retrograde is just throwing away free velocity.

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

#97

Post by nharada »

jstummbillig wrote: post #65

I have absolutely no idea how that number relates to any comparable operation. Can anyone add a banana for scale?

Assuming it's a constant data transfer rate, this is 3,889 Gbps. This is

- About 4,000 customers worth of maxed out Gigabit internet

- ~243,000 simultaneous Netflix 4K streams

- 1.6% the capacity of the latest BlueMed undersea fiber cable

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

#98

Post by MeImCounting »

new_user_final wrote: post #87
jstummbillig wrote: post #65

I have absolutely no idea how that number relates to any comparable operation. Can anyone add a banana for scale?

Bangladesh, the whole country, usage 2,300Gbps as of 2021. So 1 Petabyte per hour? Edit: It's international traffic. YouTube, Facebook video has local cache server by ISP.

This is a useful scale of comparison and what I think OP was after

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

#100

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

edgyquant wrote: post #93
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed of light in a vacuum is roughly 50% higher than the speed of light in fiber.

The area between a starlink receiver on the ground and a satellite isn’t a vacuum

That's a great point, I was curious so I looked it up. Google offered the following:

"The speed of light in air is about 299,705 kilometers per second, or 2.99705 × 10^8 meters per second. This is almost as fast as light travels in a vacuum, slowing down by only three ten-thousandths of the speed of light."

So seems like the speed of light in atmosphere is still a lot faster than fiber.

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