88
Starlink's Laser System is Beaming 42 Petabytes of Data Per Day
(www.pcmag.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
88 points (84.9% liked)
Technology
59415 readers
3119 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
For comparison, an average trans Atlantic submarine cable is about 0.1 petabit PER SECOND. And there are many cables…
It's less impressive when you convert back to petabytes. When you do that starlink is "only" about 20 times slower than that single trans-atlantic cable.
Interestingly, it's possible that starlink routed ping times could be less, as propagation speed on fiber is only around 2/3rds the speed of light. So if the end to end path length is roughly equivalent between the two (and LEO radius is a relatively small addition to the radius of the earth) it could be faster.
Certain companies would pay a lot of money to be a few milliseconds faster than their competitors if they need to react quickly to foreign stock market fluctuations.
Please keep in mind that it is an average cable, that exists today, the new ones are faster. This is also under sea, where the traffic is smaller than on continent. Also, this is just one cable as opposed to the whole network. Overall, the starlink traffic is tiny.