| ▲ | wcfields 10 hours ago |
| Someone else with more experience could chime in but I would put it at less practical due to latency (sats are very high up), bandwidth (one laser vs a bundle of 1000s of fiber optic cables), cost (to overcome latency you need a closer orbit which requires more sats), single point of failure, lifespan, intercepted communications, solar flares… and that’s just off the top of my head. |
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| ▲ | joha4270 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't actually think latency would be that much worse. Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour |
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| ▲ | christina97 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency. | | |
| ▲ | p1mrx an hour ago | parent [-] | | Light travels 2000 km in 7 ms. Maybe you took the inverse and got 150 Hz? |
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| ▲ | Razengan 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum That made me wonder: Why can't we use vacuum cables? (the sort of questions I should probably be bothering an LLM with.. someone should make a LMGPTTFY) | | |
| ▲ | joha4270 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you figure out how to make cheap vacuum cables you will probably become very rich. But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive) | |
| ▲ | pkaye 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not vacuum but an inert gas: https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/fiber/Hollow-core-fiber.html | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Why can't we use vacuum cables? Hollow-core fiber is basically this! > LMGPTTFY "let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"? | | |
| ▲ | Razengan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > "let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"? yes |
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| ▲ | auspiv 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| starlink sats are some of the lowest orbiting satellites in space - 330-370km for v3. this helps latency as well as easy deorbit at end of life. the v3 sats have multiple 400 gbps lasers for meshing... I can't decide if your comment is sarcasm or not actually because starlink is fully functional and doesn't have any of those issues |
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| ▲ | skippyboxedhero 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| latency lower for satellites, trading firms have looked at this already, no idea if anyone has actually done it bandwidth would indeed be worse |
