On 5/11/2021 2:18 pm, Darrell Budic wrote:
>
>>
>> Waves in this case generally refers to 10G/100G leased optical 
>> circuit capacity.
>
> As has already been mentioned, I did mean optical waves. Comes from my 
> perspective as a network guy who uses lots of optical transport and 
> DWDM systems. Realized I should have been more specific about optical 
> waves, especially in this forum. Even more specifically, “waves” are 
> generally a product provided you by someone else who lights the fiber 
> for you. In this case, probably Zayo, Lumen, Crown Castle, and maybe 
> even Google operating the fiber. Generally 10G waves, or some multiple 
> there of, although 100G waves are out there, and 400G are 
> coming/testing/just entering production.
>
> In this case, I suspect it means 10G waves given the currently 
> estimated capacity of the ground stations. Moving to dark lets them do 
> Nx10G links more cost effectively, or 100G link if the distance is 
> short enough (around 100km at the moment before you have to go to the 
> much more expensive coherent optics). And you can do you own support 
> and monitoring, which I got the impression was part of their problem 
> with Google’s NOC.
Thanks for that - I know them by a different term here but maybe I'm 
just not up with the play ;-) I know what you mean. That said, a single 
10G circuit wouldn't even feed a fully loaded bent pipe Gen 1 Starlink 
bird, so I could imagine that with several birds being trackable by each 
ground station, those 100G links and higher will be hot property.

-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282

The University of Auckland
ulrich@cs.auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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