Reply to post: Re: Telecom Companies Rule

Re: Telecom Companies Rule

You are banking on the speed of light to necessarily generate faster comms. It doesn't. We've had lots of things that used waves traveling at the speed of light to send data back and forth, including nearly every type of radio comms system you could build at the time, and plenty of them were rather slow. The waves move faster through air than through a cable, but what mostly matters is how fast they can be encoded and decoded at the ends. If, for example, the frequencies in use are prone to collisions, that introduces a bunch of latency that wouldn't be there otherwise. Cables don't really have this problem. That's not the only issue either. To illustrate this, consider that modern satellite internet uses the same geostationary orbits that the original ones used, and while latency isn't much improved, bandwidth has been rising rapidly. The electronics have improved; the physics is the same. So just because there are some numbers that look like they make a point, it doesn't necessarily mean they're correct.

In addition, consider how the satellites actually send data. You have to uplink to a satellite. If that satellite isn't in range of the target, it has to send a signal to another one. That might have to happen a number of times before you reach a satellite in the right geographic position, which then downlinks to a ground facility, which uses cable to connect to the host, which then contacts the ground facility with the data, which sends that to the satellite, which has to send the result back to your satellite, and then it arrives at your house. All these factors could introduce latency problems, and some could introduce bandwidth problems. If there isn't a conveniently-located ground facility for your destination, you might end up experiencing most of the cable delay anyway. If you're after a server in a place like Singapore, with a lot of servers and little room for satellite downlink space, you might find that the relatively few satellites there are heavily burdened. A lot of this is difficult to calculate without access to the full documentation that the company has and guessing at part of it. At least, not until it actually goes into service and we can experience it for ourselves. Until then, you might want to think twice before declaring it's definite success with such vigor.