Re:Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
by jnsaff2 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @07:13AM
(#26178934)
Sydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.
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Re:Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
by kweinber on Thursday February 18, 2021 @09:29AM
(#26180131)
Just looked it up. 94ms. Starlink has far more latency.
By your lightsped math, Starlink won’t ever be able to compete on latency except in the most rural of areas with poor connectivity since low earth orbit has far more travel distance than convoluted surface routing.
Re:Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
by Jedd on Thursday February 18, 2021 @03:39PM
(#26185189)
Yup, we might be down to 100ms now -- certainly still a long way from your initial 15ms guess.
Since I moved on from that last gig, I note that Telstra completed their Sydney-Perth re-cabling project, and the Vocus Perth-Singapore undersea link came online (2018-04).
(I believe east coast traffic routes through Perth to get to Singapore, which was/is/will continue to be part of the problem.)
"lightspeed math" means LEO may well offer performance improvements over terrestrial cabling in many non-obvious scenarios.
Re:Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
by ecpottinger on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:03AM
(#26181466)
Redo your math, in space the speed of light is at it's max. On fiber or cable the speed is cut almost in half. Result, Starlink with lasers can be faster.