7 ms·
I saw something interesting the other day that I had previously missed: Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial f
by tpmx 7y ago
I saw something interesting the other day that I had previously missed:
Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial fiber because light travels faster in vacuum than in optical silica fiber.
"Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in Space"
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/ https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf
"We conclude that a network built in this manner can provide lower latency communications than any possible terrestrial optical fiber network for communications over distances greater than about 3000 km."
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoYeah pretty interesting. The primary use-case I imagine that it will improve is voice and video real-time communications. Anything that lowers the round-trip time during a human conversation is going to be very significant to improving the user experience.
- donkeyd 7y agoI guess high frequency traders might be interested too then.
- jayd16 7y agoAren't they all just across the street form wall street with exactly the same network ping as everyone else?
- coob 7y agoThat doesn't help if you're transmitting information from Shanghai Exchanges to London trying to gain first mover advantage.
- TomMarius 7y agoWhy would you do that?
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoBecause there are billions of dollars/year of money in it. Things that happen outside New York have an impact on stock prices in New York. Much of HFT is essentially companies racing each other to be the very first to act on external news/stock movements.
- karanbhangui 7y agoarbitrage
- sudhirj 7y agoBecause when something happens in China companies in the UK and the US that have supply chains there (almost everybody) will be affected.
- jb775 7y agoThe trades originate from elsewhere around the world.
- bearcobra 7y agoReal Engineering has an interesting video on why it would be useful for firms trading internationally https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs
- ortusdux 7y agoI expect some early customers to be trading houses that want a faster connection for HFT.
- jayd16 7y agoPretty neat. I guess they could vendor out to Google. GCP Spanner relies on reliable low ping fiber between zones so this might be a clear throughput win for them.
- tpmx 7y agoA high bandwidth dynamically directed laser-based mesh network of 12k-42k tiny satellites 340 km above the earth is a pretty ballsy concept to begin with. I'm curious about who came up with this idea. It's kind of brilliant.
- pstuart 7y agoArthur C. Clarke, in a way. http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/ http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/
- tpmx 7y agoSure, we owe Clarke a great deal of gratitude for that (the concept of the geostationary satellite 35k km from earth, from way back in 1945!), but this is something else and new.
- woah 7y agoIt follows pretty logically from any kind of work in the wireless business. There’s a very direct correlation between transmitter altitude, and how likely it is that the transmitter will be able to connect to any given client. It follows that the best transmitter is one that is in space, which is why communications were one of the first commercial uses of satellites.
- tpmx 7y agoThat's a way too simplified view that doesn't take latency into consideration. Or even the concept of a network.
- plopz 7y agoI thought I read somewhere that they cancelled the plans to use lasers and were going to use radio instead. But now I can't find anything about it.
- tpmx 7y agoRadio and light have (for the purposes of this comparison) the same speed in vacuum.
- Ajedi32 7y agoThe current generation of Starlink satellites don't have satellite-to-satilite links, but I haven't seen any indication that that feature is canceled for future iterations.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoHow do they work without sat to sat links? Are they going to build thousands of ground stations?
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoThey have not cancelled the plans to use lasers, but have delayed the introduction of lasers until "satellite version 2.0", whatever that means. That is, the initial constellation (my guess, the first 800 satellites) goes up without intersat links and acts as a bent pipe only. Lasers are still very much a plan for the later parts on the constellation, and the laserless satellites will eventually be replaced with ones with the lasers once they age out, but the laser links were simply not ready yet and their spectrum license essentially forces them to put the birds up on as quick a schedule as they can. The laserless sats will not use radio to communicate with each other, but rather will use it to communicate with customers and fixed earth stations.
- jb775 7y agoI wonder how the Starlink latency compares to the current microwave technologies used by high frequency trading firms. Any slight latency improvement is a game-changer in the HFT industry.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoIIRC this is how they plan to finance it.
- XJ6 7y agoYou just made that up.
- WillDaSilva 7y agoI doubt that, since I've also heard this claim several times.
- mhh__ 7y agoIf he was lying why would he say IIRC?
- hndamien 7y agoMaybe he just doesn't recall correctly.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoWhy yes I make random shit up about how people plan to finance their low latency satellite constellations allla damn time. Ya got me. It's a fair cop guv.
- manicdee 7y agoI don’t recall SpaceX explicitly stating who they expect their customers to be, but fans quickly dredged up currency and remote stock trading as one potential major source of funding (single customers with huge budgets, rather than hundreds of homes on the cheapest plan)
- 7y ago