In article ,
says...

On 2018-11-22 00:38, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Light in fiber is much slower than light in vacuum. It is, in point
of fact, almost a third slower. Now don't you feel stupid for getting
all snarky?

Yet, whenever it hits a satellite, that light has to be received,
converted to electricity. Not clear if light pulse is routed to the
emittor to the next satellite, or if the satellite needs to receive full
packet before routing it. Every hop introduces latency, and that latency
is greater when you route/switch packets instead of light pulses. So it
bcomes very architecture dependant. (consider care of a light beam from
A to B may contain packets destined to C or D, at whioch point you need
packet switching).

Fiber has the same issues.

And more importantly, while your light may travel faster in vacuum, if
it is a single beam, its capacity would be less and that too introduces
latency as packets need to wait in a queue to get on the light beam.

You're assuming the lasers are the bottleneck. On what basis are you
making this assumption?

McCall doesn't believe 100gbps is common on fibre strands, doesn't
believe that WDM exists to combine multiple separate 100gbps links on a
single strand so hard to discuss when he is so focused on perosnal insults.


And am curious how SpaceX will deal with something called the "SUN". Sun
hitting a sensor on a satellite may blind it from the much weaker laser
signal coming from another satellite. Shades woudl be an obvious
solutions if they can move quickly enough, but may not solve all cases
such as when the sun is low and "parralel" to a laser beam from another
satellite.

Obviously sun shades. And for the rare case where the laser beam is
parallel to the sun's rays, you can route the data around the impacted
satellites instead of through them.

You keep throwing up these hand-waved arguments like no one at SpaceX
has ever thought of these things. The reality is that SpaceX has surely
hired experts in the areas necessary and they don't need to rely on
random people on the Internet posting strawman arguments as to why
Starlink will never work because...

And lastly, Starlink doesn't have to be perfect at first. It just has
to be better than the offerings it is competing against. Primarily that
will be existing satellite offerings that are based on GEO comsats and
whose latency is stupid slow. That's a low bar to clear.

As improvements are made, and newer satellites are launched, the service
will only get better. Designing them to have only a 3 year lifetime
allows for continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is something
all of Musk's companies have done. They're usually quite good at it
too.

Jeff
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