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 4 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.

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Razengan 6 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 5 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 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Not vacuum but an inert gas: https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/fiber/Hollow-core-fiber.html
	▲	LoganDark 5 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"?