5 ms·
Curious how this will pan out. It's a shocking contrast to be in or near a city and have broadband speeds, and then be just a few dozen miles outside one and h
by creeble 8y ago
Curious how this will pan out.
It's a shocking contrast to be in or near a city and have broadband speeds, and then be just a few dozen miles outside one and have... literally nothing.
I just loaned my Iridium phone to a friend who was going to the jungle, and although he was able to make the data connection work, even doing email at 2400 baud(!) proved useless. Inmarsat is faster, but vastly more expensive.
Outside of those two, there is no global solution.
- aportnoy 8y agoIridium already employs SpaceX for their launches.
- dzhiurgis 8y agoWhat's perplexing is why Iridium is not doing way more. They are essentially just letting SpaceX to cannibalise them. Sure, they don't have fancy rockets, but still can scale their satellite net before Elon catches up with sat tech or outsource launches to even cheaper Indian launch provider. p.s. the story of Iridium and how they recovered is quite amazing.
- Scoundreller 8y agoI think the more amazing part of Iridium’s story is that they got the money to launch their constellation in the first place. It’s crushing debt and inevitable bankruptcy with the assets being acquired for something like 1/20th of a cent on the dollar was to be expected really.
- manquer 8y agoIridium is around now. Both their next gen and the old gen. SpaceX will take atleast 5-7 years to get full coverage. The customer base of iridium is very different than what SpaceX is targeting.. there should be room for more than one player
- stcredzero 8y agoeven doing email at 2400 baud(!) proved useless In the late 90's I did a lot of my grad school coding and implemented a website for a state agency though 9600 baud modems. EMACS was great in those days, precisely because it's a Lisp machine OS masquerading as a text editor. I used to read USENET news, read my email, do my work, shuffle between multiple remotely logged in shells, all through EMACS.
- PeterisP 8y agoIt depends on what you mean by "email". "Doing email" as in SMTP/POP at 2400 baud is feasible, "doing email" as in accessing a https webmail service is not. You can communicate effectively over 2400 baud if (and only if) you use protocols and services designed for low bandwidth; luckily we have those protocols built and tested, even if we have mostly abandoned some of them.
- djweis 8y agoIt's workable if you take your MTU down to 256 or 128.
- dzhiurgis 8y agoAre you actually suggesting dropping SSL? Sure, Iridium is somewhat encrypted and indeed provide its own Facebook and Twitter apps.
- PeterisP 8y agoOver 2400 baud? Yes, I probably would suggest dropping SSL and instead transmit pre-encrypted data over a very plain, very simple connection to avoid the overhead of SSL handshake (something like 5kb for current keysizes?) and its latency. GPG-encrypted email over plain POP would work; and you can have automatic "remailers" on both sides of the link that handle the encryption/decryption once the communications are done over a "normal" connection.
- wolf550e 8y ago1-RTT TLS 1.3 handshake with small ECC keys and certificate chain optimized for size, and TLS shouldn't be a problem to sync mail over slow connection.
- 51lver 8y agoSimple and reliable pgp encryption will outlast tls 1.3, and rural users (quite reasonably) expect more life from their devices than city folks. No one is going to download and update with a 200MB image at 2400bps afterall.
- nugga 8y agoStarlink could be a godsent for online gamers. Anything under 100 ms for fps games is quite playable and you don't need much bandwidth for those udp packets. Just guarantee some minimum bandwidth allotment of say 1 mbps and make sure the satellites are not so oversubscribed as to cause unnecessarily long or unoptimized routing. Games between west coast usa and eu or eu and asia would be playable.
- calebh 8y agoMaybe this will help boost the "game as a service" offerings.
- shaklee3 8y agois this really true? I haven't played video games in a long time, but I remember when playing counter strike that someone with a 20ms ping was at a significant advantage over someone with an 80ms ping.
- kbenson 8y agoI think playable is meant more in a "we can have a fun game" sense and less of a "I can be competitive at a high level" sense. Even the former becomes hard at higher latencies.
- nugga 8y agoSure, I'm using 4 G mobile internets now and occasionally have to play call of duty at around 80 ms and I can still kick ass. There's no place like LAN for hardcore competitive gaming but if the game's netcode is done well 80 ms is good enough. The trick is to have some sort of lag compensation, which cs should have as far as I know, where you don't have to lead your shots so the feel of the game is mostly the same, you just get the reports a bit later than you would at 20 ms.
- russdill 8y agoIf you're going to another continent, you're going to see a big latency savings. If your going to another state, you're probably going to get lower latency on fiber. But really, a 60Hz frame is 33.3ms, and many online games advance their world state at 60Hz too, so it's easy to get up to 67 ms of latency just sitting still.
- russdill 8y agoAs far as I know, they still serve different purposes. The starlink antenna needs to see a large portion of the sky and needs to be stationary.