Lasers are no longer low latency when distances are huge
Comment on Why put data centers in space?
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
Solar power and low latency laser communications.
Power is free* in space.
Communications between satellites is as fast as fast can be, fast enough that it can be faster to go earth-sat-sat-sat-earth than via fibre under the ocean.
The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.
Natanael@infosec.pub 5 days ago
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 5 days ago
Lasers in space are speed of light in a vacuum which it considerably faster than speed of light in a fibre.
Natanael@infosec.pub 5 days ago
And then promptly loses out to the longer distance between nodes, slower network gear on the satellites themselves, the massive latency loss to requiring more complex higher redundancy signal coding due to the energy loss in the laser across the distance (since it spreads out, vs a fiber maintaining most energy). Even if you used dense LEO satellites like Starlink it remains unreliable and the motion of satellites means you can’t have a stable path length.
Tldr it’s useless for almost everything. You need to be able to not just use efficient live path selection when sending traffic, you have to be able afford to pay for QoS priority on wildly expensive satellites due to all the specifical equipment and hardware capacity limits
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 5 days ago
If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Exactly. It is lower latency.
You’re moving the goal posts now to the problem being commercial viability for a subset of activity.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Honestly I feel like a big issue is the physical security. Now your data center is more vulnerable to any orbit capable adversary.