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hu3 17 hours ago

I wonder if we will be able to completely replace these cables with satellites one day.

rcxdude 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, even with Starlink lowering the latency to an acceptable level, there's no way to get anywhere near the total bandwidth of these cables with a satellite constellation, there's limits to how much you can transmit through the air (the biggest issue being there's limits to how tightly you can form beams from your satellite to a station on the ground, and those are quite large, so you ultimately can only get a certain bandwidth per square kilometer).

(This, BTW, is why Starlink isn't and will never be a true competitor to traditional ISPs in all but the most sparsely populated areas: they simply cannot support enough users to make a dent in most places)

shiroiushi 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have to develop subspace (i.e. faster-than-light) communications for this to work. The distance between two points in Europe, after bouncing off a satellite in geostationary orbit, is very, very far, and EM waves can only travel at lightspeed, resulting in very long latency. It's significantly faster if your satellite is in low-earth orbit, but you can't keep a satellite in a fixed position there, so now you need a whole swarm of them so you have sufficient coverage at any time, and you need a way of periodically boosting their orbits or replacing them as they fall into the atmosphere.

There's a very good reason the world likes submarine cables for internet communications.

thegrim33 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't that exactly what Starlink and other similar services are doing? They're putting swarms of communication satellites into LEO for this very purpose.

Starlinks are placed in LEO at 550km, which would have a theoretical 3.6ms round-trip ping at the speed of light. That is not a "very long latency".

shiroiushi 16 hours ago | parent [-]

No, it's not, it's doing the "swarm" thing I mentioned to get around the limitations of GEO. The downside is now you have a big swarm of satellites in orbit, interfering with telescopes, and regularly falling into the atmosphere. Also, there's a significant cost to maintaining this system, and its total bandwidth capability is limited.

verzali 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, we won't. It would be easier and cheaper to replace them with microwave links or something like that. Satellites are always more expensive, limited in power, harder to fix, and unlikely to ever match the capacity of underwater cables.

N19PEDL2 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think microwaves could be jammed too. The safest solution is probably to run the cables over the Øresund Bridge and the future Fehmarn Belt tunnel, and then continue overland to Finland.

mjbeswick 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No because they would be point to point. Many parts of the phone network were connected via microwave links before fibre optic cables replaced them, as fibre carry much higher amounts of data.

jazzyjackson 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Redundancy doesn't hurt.