Re: [Starlink] 42 petabytes/day and ...

[Alexandre Petrescu <alexandre.petrescu@gmail.com>]

Le 02/02/2024 à 04:07, Dave Taht via Starlink a écrit :
> from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323
>
> There were two things that fell out of reading that article for me.
>
> "each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity."
>
> +
>
> "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."

It looks spectacular.

A starlink latency of say 40ms on such a long distance 5400km between 
sats seems remarkable.  Note that the corresponding on-ground distance 
between two homes served by these two sats would be smaller, perhaps 
3000km(?).

It is easy to compare that via-stalink latency to a ping RTT on a ground 
only link on comparable distance.

Alex

>
> So there IS a way to achieve previously unheard of lower latencies (at
> a cost in bitrate) across starlink across their network. Two hops to
> go 10,000km.
>
> I loved mark handley's original animation of how the ISL's were
> supposed to work, but given the orbits  here, I kind of wish it was
> easy to plug the assumptions in and figure out what the NY -> tokoyo
> run would take in terms of hops and estimated switching overhead,
> given this distance record.
>
> How much data and what kind of data would benefit from that latency
> reduction is a matter of speculation. "Buy! Sell!" between tokoyo and
> london arbitrage was one of my first speculations many years ago.
>