this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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I wouldn't say I was a fanboy, but I liked him before .. I don't know, he was always crazy. These days he's even more crazy and I'm not touching anything he does.
I can't stand him but Starlink is so fucking awesome. Having high speed internet fucking everywhere is a game changer.
It's not gonna be high bandwidth though, just low latency over long distances. It's primarily for stock exchange information.
Mate, it's the opposite that's true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
I did more digging and:
"Traditional" satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they're the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I'm not a physics dude, so I don't know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there's a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn't a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The "genius" of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn't really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
Umm, high latency means slow reactions. I think you and OP meant the same thing, but you have the terms mixed up