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- cross-posted to:
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SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today. That translates into 42 million gigabytes. Each of the 9,000 lasers in the network is capable of transmitting at 100Gbps, and satellites can form ad-hoc mesh networks to complete long-haul transmissions when there are no ground towers nearby (like when they’re going across oceans).
I’m on a cruise ship trying Starlink for the first time and it’s impressive. I haven’t tried anything yet that requires low latency like gaming but websites and video streaming are all fast and responsive.
It’s less than 50 milliseconds generally. Low earth orbit and all. I don’t know that I want to join an FPS tournament on it, but there are worse landlines in existence
That’s when there’s a ground station in view of the Starlink satellite. The laser links add latency, but it’s still a hell of a lot faster than GEO satellites.