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Re:Google Fiber Was Doomed from the Start by agildehaus on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @04:09PM (#13879333)
A satellite constellation like this will actually be more efficient for long distance communication than fiber as hops will be more or less a straight line between a few sats whereas fiber on the ground often takes crazy paths due to terrain and politics.

If SpaceX can prove reusability, which is looking likely, putting up a constellation like this will become significantly cheaper. They also can just reuse first stages that their own customers already paid for (their customers pay for the flight, not the stage itself).

Re:Google Fiber Was Doomed from the Start by lsjdfkljdfwkwdf on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @05:26PM (#13879941)
Efficient? Long haul fiber (DWDM) capacity is measures in Tbps....
Re:Google Fiber Was Doomed from the Start by Retric on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @06:02PM (#13880261)
I don't have SpaceX numbers. But, a constellation like this was supposed to provide ~200 Gbytes per month for 5 billion people, which works out to ~3000 terabytes per second or ~5 terabits per second per satellite at a minimum. (More if they are modeling the ocean.)

http://www.popsci.com/samsung-wants-launch-thousands-satelli...

ED: Here is the paper. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1508/1508.02383.pdf

Re:Google Fiber Was Doomed from the Start by agildehaus on Friday March 17, 2017 @11:18PM (#13899697)
In terms of latency, not raw capacity.