from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RGX6QFm5E Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos _______________________________________________ Starlink mailing list Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
