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."
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.
--
40 years of net history, a couple songs:
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
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