14 ms·

I'm curious how many households this would support, taking into account usage distributions over time. Would this be sufficient for a medium city? A large town?

jaywalk 4y ago
Zero households. This system is meant to communicate with one ground station at a time, and only for a very brief window. It's really only good for downlinking bulk data that was collected by the satellite, not Internet access.
nix23 4y ago
You forgott latency...not usable for rt communication.
- emkoemko 4y ago
  how so? stock markets are using lasers to reduce trading latency vs everything else available so what do you mean not usable for real time communication?
  - govg 4y ago
    There's an inherent limit to how fast you can communicate with objects in space, so a video call with someone where you will have 1-2s of lag (guaranteed by laws of physics, not occasionally) might be unusable. There is also the impact of distance, you might have even higher latency to the same object depending on the time of the year (Earth - Mars today vs Earth - Mars few months out).
    - nwiswell 4y ago
      Your figures are totally wrong. The distance to geostationary orbit is around 30,000 km, so at the speed of light (~300,000 km/s), that is 100 ms of latency. Low earth orbit is 3,000 km or so, meaning that's only 10 ms each way. Odds are good that if you had a mesh network of low earth orbit satellites (like Starlink) you could actually get an antipodal point-to-point video call with less latency than with terrestrial fiber. That's not a function of bad terrestrial switching/routing: it's the fact that light travels faster through vacuum.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Latency to the Moon and back is below 2.5 seconds. Bouncing a signal off the Moon is a known ham radio operators' pastime.
    - emkoemko 4y ago
      "household" i assumed person was talking about geo or low earth orbit communication, everyone knows light can only go so fast.
  - nix23 4y ago
    To shorten the distance, not make it longer (aka satellite). And i don't think it's laser but microwave. https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/the-swiss-stock-exchange/trading/trading-platform/microwave.html https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/the-swiss-sto...
kipchak 4y ago
I've seen numbers of about 2.7Mbps[1] for average peak traffic rates per subscriber on cable, which would give you about 37,000 users if I didn't mess up my bits and bytes. But as the FSO link is point to point, you would need something like a high-altitude platform station (HAPS) like a blimp, UAVs with RF or a RF tower on the ground to receive the FSO signal, and then broadcast it to many users. [1]https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2018/2018-analysis-and-prediction-of-peak-data-rates-through-docsis-cores/download https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2018/2018-analysis...
foreverobama 4y ago
You're dreaming, buddy. 5G can't even be successfully utilized in the richest nation on earth (U.S.). This brand new tech is decades from customer applications. Cool display of technology, but I won't get excited over something that won't improve the lives of anyone except the military industrial complex and its benefactors while internet services and cell services continue to degrade every year.
- dang 4y ago
  Since you've already started breaking the site guidelines again, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com with reason to believe that you'll stick to the site guidelines in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- teerak 4y ago
  The US is notoriously bad for fast internet in general though. Here in Asia 5G is mostly rolled out in some places, I was getting 100Mbps on my phone the other day.

jaywalk 4y ago

Zero households. This system is meant to communicate with one ground station at a time, and only for a very brief window. It's really only good for downlinking bulk data that was collected by the satellite, not Internet access.

nix23 4y ago

You forgott latency...not usable for rt communication.

emkoemko 4y ago
how so? stock markets are using lasers to reduce trading latency vs everything else available so what do you mean not usable for real time communication?
- govg 4y ago
  There's an inherent limit to how fast you can communicate with objects in space, so a video call with someone where you will have 1-2s of lag (guaranteed by laws of physics, not occasionally) might be unusable. There is also the impact of distance, you might have even higher latency to the same object depending on the time of the year (Earth - Mars today vs Earth - Mars few months out).
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    Your figures are totally wrong. The distance to geostationary orbit is around 30,000 km, so at the speed of light (~300,000 km/s), that is 100 ms of latency. Low earth orbit is 3,000 km or so, meaning that's only 10 ms each way. Odds are good that if you had a mesh network of low earth orbit satellites (like Starlink) you could actually get an antipodal point-to-point video call with less latency than with terrestrial fiber. That's not a function of bad terrestrial switching/routing: it's the fact that light travels faster through vacuum.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Latency to the Moon and back is below 2.5 seconds. Bouncing a signal off the Moon is a known ham radio operators' pastime.
  - emkoemko 4y ago
    "household" i assumed person was talking about geo or low earth orbit communication, everyone knows light can only go so fast.
- nix23 4y ago
  To shorten the distance, not make it longer (aka satellite). And i don't think it's laser but microwave. https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/the-swiss-stock-exchange/trading/trading-platform/microwave.html https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/the-swiss-sto...

kipchak 4y ago

I've seen numbers of about 2.7Mbps[1] for average peak traffic rates per subscriber on cable, which would give you about 37,000 users if I didn't mess up my bits and bytes. But as the FSO link is point to point, you would need something like a high-altitude platform station (HAPS) like a blimp, UAVs with RF or a RF tower on the ground to receive the FSO signal, and then broadcast it to many users. [1]https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2018/2018-analysis-and-prediction-of-peak-data-rates-through-docsis-cores/download https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2018/2018-analysis...

foreverobama 4y ago

You're dreaming, buddy. 5G can't even be successfully utilized in the richest nation on earth (U.S.). This brand new tech is decades from customer applications. Cool display of technology, but I won't get excited over something that won't improve the lives of anyone except the military industrial complex and its benefactors while internet services and cell services continue to degrade every year.

dang 4y ago
Since you've already started breaking the site guidelines again, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com with reason to believe that you'll stick to the site guidelines in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
teerak 4y ago
The US is notoriously bad for fast internet in general though. Here in Asia 5G is mostly rolled out in some places, I was getting 100Mbps on my phone the other day.