Comment on Is Starlink even good for online gaming?
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
The comparison to subsea cables can’t be made yet, because Starlink doesn’t work that way yet. You are routed up to a reachable satellite maybe at most one or two hops over the inter satellite laser links to other satellites (but it’s hard to confirm anything concrete), and then quickly back down to the next reachable ground station. From there it’s fiberoptics.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
I’ve been thinking more about this: It seems unlikely they will ever provide a significant portion of intercontinental traffic, even if there is some latency benefit. The fundamental issue is one of bandwidth. You can stuff fiber optics full of data in ways most lay people wouldn’t believe. Using different frequencies you can put many data channels parallel. 88 x 200 Gigabit/s per fiber is no issue at all with components we bought 5-10 years ago already for our use case on land, and spectral efficiency is still getting better. A typical subsea cable will have around 8 fiber pairs, so 8 x 88 x 200 G in both directions for one cable is probably normal.
The intersatellite links on Starlink satellites are reportedly also at 200G, and there are three of them on there, but intended to go to different neighbors I think. I’m not familiar with the specifics of free space optics, but I expect both wavelength division multiplexing will be much harder.
So only applications where latency is really critical will probably be able to buy into that limited intercontinental bandwith. High frequency trading maybe. And then diplomacy and military, where the tapping resistance plays a bigger role than the latency.