Comment on Why put data centers in space?

• 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.

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  • 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

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    • 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.

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      • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Look at the paper I added. It does lose up to a huge distance because of the uplinks and satellite movement. It takes something ridiculous to get use of space lasers.

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