9 ms·
Speed is variable, capacity can be improved. The bigger question re Starlink is latency, which this test doesn't show.
by mbrevda1 6y ago
Speed is variable, capacity can be improved. The bigger question re Starlink is latency, which this test doesn't show.
- iso947 6y agoLatency to where? One of the promises of starlink is reducing latency over mid distance - say transatlantic or even across the states, due to using vacuum rather than fibres. Will be interesting how HFT use it. Starlink network is nowhere near complete so I’d expect things to only get better (until customers start piling on)
- Zr40 6y agoWhy would HFT even consider using it? They are located as close as possible to the exchange they operate on, not across states or halfway across the world.
- moonbug 6y agoarbitrage
- yeahoo 6y agoorbitRage
- guywhocodes 6y agoGeographically distributed arbitrage?
- konschubert 6y agoArbitrage between multiple exchanges requires data to go from exchange A to exchange B as fast as possible. Light in vacuum is faster than light in fiber.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raducu 6y agoLight in vacuum is only faster if it goes in a straight line from point A to B, not if it zig-zags across 50 satellites.
- emteycz 6y agoHow could zigzagging through fiber be faster thaz zigzagging through vacuum? You still need to cross nearly the same distance with fiber.
- raducu 6y agoThe fiber is a fixed geometry. The satellite mesh is not, a straight line from point A to point B is not possible most of the time, given the number of satellites available and range of laser communication in space.
- iso1210 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU is an animation of how it's supposed to work, including latencies There are enough satelites and low enough routing on the lasers to mean packets will arrive from London to NY faster than even a great-circle fibre. In reality how much bandwidth is available is a function of money, and HFTs tend to have a lot of money.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- filleokus 6y agoBut if you can access to information from an exchange halfway across the world faster than others, you can definitely trade on that.
- de_watcher 6y agoAnd if you can break the speed of light, you don't need a second exchange.
- garmaine 6y agoIt’s quite easy to “break” the speed of light in fiberoptic glass.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- de_watcher 6y agoBut it's not that useful even if you pour a glass cube over the whole exchange to slow it down.
- peteretep 6y ago> It’s quite easy to “break” the speed of light in fiberoptic glass. I don’t understand this, why? Does light travel faster than the speed of light in fibre optic glass?
- Dylan16807 6y ago"the speed of light in fiberoptic glass" is the thing being broken.
- Torkel 6y agoSame stock is listed in more than one place, and also e.g. stock movements in NY affect stocks in London. There are undersea cables built for this purpose: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a7274/a-transatlantic-cable-to-shave-5-milliseconds-off-stock-trades/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
- eecc 6y agoWhat a waste of human ingenuity. And I thought ad-tech was bad enough
- unishark 6y agoThat is true for much of the finance field.
- emteycz 6y agoActually it's not. There are objective benefits to society that you simply ignore.
- piva00 6y agoAs there are objective downsides that we, collectively, are ignoring right now. Financial capitalism shouldn't be praised, at the very best it's a lesson, we got useful tools out of it and that is all.
- arijun 6y agoThey make trades at one exchange based of prices at another. For that reason there has been a lot of microwave relays set up between New York and Chicago, for example. Starlink could reduce latency from New York to London, another important center of trade.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoLight travels 47% slower in a fiber optic cable than it does in the vacuum of space. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 (the whole video is worth watching, but that timestamp answers your specific question.
- raducu 6y agoToo lazy to watch it -- does it take into account the multiple criss-crossing satellite hops? I watched it -- no it doesn't :) It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation. So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics. But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
- endogui 6y agoHFT have installed microwave relays between Chicago and New York and between London and Berlin to arbitrage on the 47% fiber optic delay between the exchanges. A LEO satellite relay serves the same purpose. I can see London to New York, New York to Tokyo fiber connections being superceded by LEO satellite.
- zhte415 6y agoQuite surprised why LEO for cross exchange arbitrage was not already done. Microwaves were not super with weather conditions the last time taking an arbitrary interest.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoLEO sat constellations that are low enough to beat existing solutions need to be almost global to provide reliable communication anywhere.
- kaliszad 6y agoIf you mean Deutsche Börse AG, than that would be Frankfurt am Main and not Berlin which is a slight difference of about 400 km. Frankfurt to London is actually a shorter distance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges
- Torkel 6y agoIf I understood it correctly Starlink doesn't send between satellites yet, only sat<->ground. Sat<->sat is a big point of starlink and when they roll that out the latency should go down, especially for starlink<->starlink comms I imagine.
- iso947 6y agoYes that’s a few more years before then, and the more sats the more capacity and the lower the latency.
- raducu 6y agoWhat is the lifetime of a SpaceX satellite? Judging from their high launch cadence, it seems satellite-satellite communication was just a means to excite the fanboys and motivate their employees, the same way the peddle the Mars stuff.
- taneq 6y agoI don't understand how this is meant to lower the latency. Currently: ground <--> satellite <--> ground With satellite links: ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground How can the latter possibly be faster? Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink connection.
- Havoc 6y agoCurrent satellites are in a much higher orbit
- Torkel 6y agoThis is a good question, I see three main reasons but I may miss something: 1. Hop count is not one on the ground to go same distance. 2. Speed of light is significantly faster in vacuum. 3. The path is potentially straighter for longer distances.
- 6y ago
- the8472 6y agoThey need sat-sat links for that, I think the current generation of starlink doesn't have that so initial customers will not see that kind of benefit, their data will be bounced back to a ground station from the same satellite.
- tsherr 6y agoI'd assume latency from endpoint to satellite back to terrestrial base station. I can get satellite Internet right now with 40Mbps down / 5 up, but the latency is 800 to 1000 ms, so it's slow.
- dstick 6y agoI saw these Starlink speed test results 2 weeks ago: https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/filters:strip_icc():strip_exif()/i/2003786186.jpeg?f=imagenormal https://tweakers.net/i/xDBb34kfMAju3YPPMsC3iOc2gXc=/656x/fil... Seems like pretty solid latency :)
- gertrunde 6y ago30-100ms is better than I feared, and should be generally reasonable for most uses.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago30 is really good actually. At least for what I’m used to.
- kalleboo 6y agoOn my home fiber, pretty much all sites I visit are like 80 ms away, Starlink would be an upgrade for me, latency-wise
- j-krieger 6y agoanything above 100 ms is starting to get into unusable territory for quite a few applications
- capableweb 6y agoCount yourself lucky you don't live in either South America, Africa or Asia, where +100ms latency is more common than not. Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Usually it's the fault of the application developers (or rather the infrastructure team) where they put too low timeouts for requests rather than letting the requests go for a bit longer. Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have. Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.