8 ms·
I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia. A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC S
by Jedd 6y ago
I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia.
A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted.
There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at close-to-c, and then down into the local base station.
The fiber cable they ran from Perth up to Singapore a few years certainly won't be abandoned - it'll still be much cheaper / wider - but I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia (f.e.).
- walrus01 6y agoin terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y agoDo the markets need lots of bandwidth? Or just-enough with the lowest possible latency
- walrus01 6y agoA lot of serious HFT has moved to HF radio bands with giant aimed yagi uda or dipole antennas, already... London, new york, chicago, tokyo. It's very low bit rate but lower latency.
- cromka 6y agoSo Australian FinTech will definitely appreciate Starlink, then?
- arcticbull 6y agoI suspect Australian FinTech would be more interested in colocating near exchanges instead of trying to beam their orders through space, but I don't work in the sector so I can't say for sure.
- Dylan16807 6y agoTotally different use cases. If you want to observe events at one exchange and send orders to another, all that matters is total latency. For that use it doesn't matter whether your servers are in the same room as one of the exchanges or 200 miles away from either one.
- robertlagrant 6y agoIt's true that total latency is what matters, and minimising latency by sitting near one of them and taking advantage of low-latency connections between exchanges sounds reasonable.
- megous 6y agoDoes this have a name? Something like "a race to ridiculousness?" It's so bizarre that it matters that someone places an order a few ms before someone else. And it's probably ns now. No time to stop and think,... just be faster than someone else.
- arcticbull 6y agoCapitalism? :P
- AdamJacobMuller 6y agoMarkets don't, but, GP said: "I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia" And the reality is that satellites can not compete with the bandwidth of subsea cables for bulk data transfer, HFT is a whole other world.
- devoutsalsa 6y agoI’d guess that high speed data transfer competes with overnight shipping a hard drive in most current cases. In my day to day life, for most cases I’d rather has 10 Mbps with 10 ms latency than 1 Gbps with 250 ms latency. Generally speaking I’m looking for a snappy user experience and fast enough for Netflix streaming to a non-premium television. But high bandwidth and low latency would be super nice!
- nly 6y agoMany wired leased lines that connect data vendors to exchanges are only ~2Mbps even in 2021. You tend to get bandwidth spikes on most feeds at market open and close, but intraday rates are low
- Robotbeat 6y agoIt's not exactly a long ways off if a dozen satellites are already using it (there were 2 previous ones). Every time SpaceX makes a goal, someone claims it's really far away until it is completed. If there was a need for Terabit/s laser capacity for Starlink, there's no particularly good reason it couldn't be developed.
- n4r9 6y agoMusk does tend to achieve his goals eventually although the timescales are generally 2-7 years too ambitious: www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals
- VectorLock 6y agoDamn that doesn't bode well for me getting a Cybertruck any time soon.
- rlt 6y agoWhy couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice? Is it because ISLs will require more powerful lasers because the light is focused through a lens instead of guided through a fiber?
- andbberger 6y agoprobably less (literal) bandwidth, lasers are expensive
- walrus01 6y agoThat and because the atmosphere is not clear (this is why 1Gbps free space laser network bridges have very limited range), the links from satellite to earth in any rf band will be very small in capacity as compared to a singlemode fiber cable. Space to space lasers, sure... Much clearer.
- andbberger 6y agoStarlink ground links are RF
- walrus01 6y agoThat's what I said
- andbberger 6y agooops my bad
- bbarnett 6y agoHigh end fibre routers use multi-spectral bandwith, effectively allowing for multiple data streams to be transmitted on one fibre cable, and re-broken out at the other end. This significantly increases bandwidth. I doubt the laser links support this, and I wonder if any could, when in a non-encapsulated environment. EG, spectral pollution from sunlight/etc.
- bahmboo 6y agoCheck out this analysis of starlink ground relay routing vs fiber https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY
- guywhocodes 6y agoAustralia min latency from Singapore is still 125ms for me. Maybe it's lack of peering from my providers side but it's definitely an issue.
- thejosh 6y agoIt's ~50 from perth though.
- IntelMiner 6y agoI get 75~ ms average on Aussie Broadband from Adelaide (FTTP) pinging Valve's Singapore game servers
- spockz 6y agoIs there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer? I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.
- Natanael_L 6y agoIf either your ISP exposes that ability or if you maintain multiple outbound connections, then yes. But I don't think this is commonly implemented today, however. You would probably have to configure your own routing table to direct traffic for each application through the appropriate link, but that's completely doable as long as you can write rules to distinguish the packets (for example based on destination).
- spockz 6y agoYes I can imagine using iptables to work but it was my understanding that this would only be able to determine the next hop and I couldn’t get it to force the decision higher up the chain. This would mean that every party along the chain has to play ball. I can imagine that it would be beneficial for the internet experience if we could segregate low latency traffic (human/hft) traffic from hulk traffic such as video. Although this goes against net neutrality I suppose.
- Natanael_L 6y agoIf you want it to be done externally without setting up a routing table then the next best option would be some kind of traffic tagging to indicate what you want to go over which line. That would start looking like a network with multiple VLAN:s.
- dmurray 6y agoIf you use TOR browser, you're already doing this. Requests from TOR browser go over TOR, if you have a regular browser open in another window your internet-routable requests there go over the internet. Of course the first hop goes via your ISP in either case, but it's easy to imagine it doesn't.
- kweinber 6y agoIsn’t the current latency between Sydney and Singapore 15ms or less by now? No one who is latency sensitive should be using Starlink unless they are in some incredibly remote location. (And they should move if they are 150ms is a cosmic age in low latency trading)
- jnsaff2 6y agoSydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.
- kweinber 6y agoJust looked it up. 94ms. Starlink has far more latency. By your lightsped math, Starlink won’t ever be able to compete on latency except in the most rural of areas with poor connectivity since low earth orbit has far more travel distance than convoluted surface routing.
- ecpottinger 6y agoRedo your math, in space the speed of light is at it's max. On fiber or cable the speed is cut almost in half. Result, Starlink with lasers can be faster.
- Jedd 6y agoYup, we might be down to 100ms now -- certainly still a long way from your initial 15ms guess. Since I moved on from that last gig, I note that Telstra completed their Sydney-Perth re-cabling project, and the Vocus Perth-Singapore undersea link came online (2018-04). (I believe east coast traffic routes through Perth to get to Singapore, which was/is/will continue to be part of the problem.) "lightspeed math" means LEO may well offer performance improvements over terrestrial cabling in many non-obvious scenarios.