Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

SpaceX are launching satellites with ("frickin") lasers now. So, if you are in the middle of the ocean, your packets step between satellites on the same orbit, forward or back, until they get in range of a node. First actual use is for polar service.

On certain routes, packets will be artificially delayed so that high-speed traders can pay big bucks to get their packets through first, ahead of fiber. And, maybe pay even bigger bucks to prevent their competitors from getting their packets through as fast. Imagine tiered pricing, where each millisecond ahead of the rest of the pack is ten times the price.

So, for example, orbits inclined near 70 degrees pass near New York and London/Frankfurt. Packets going by satellite laser links can get there many milliseconds ahead of those poking along on subsea fiber. Somebody in London who finds out 10 ms before everyone else about a price change in New York gets to make a killing trading on the exclusive information.

There is a whole world there I do not know and don't really want to. What a strange world we live in.

Yes. You can think of it as automated stealing. Much of the inequity could be eliminated by imposing a per-transaction tax.

Then you get more smart people being pointed at "minimising the tax burden" instead of "doing things faster/better".

Or you can think of it as HTF trading firms subsidizing 20-60ms internet for the common user. The last couple ms probably mean nothing to you but they mean a lot to them. I guess it depends on what your world view is.

Somehow, I foresee SpaceX just pocketing the extra money, not reducing the little peoples' prices. Have you seen any reason to expect different?

The extra money is probably needed to make the whole thing viable. SpaceX probably has a goal price for consumer plans and they are just trying to hit that price.

Regardless I just don't see SpaceX as the company that doesn't evolve with times tbh.

I do not understand that reasoning at all, where there is any.

"Evolve with times" does not seem to mean anything. In markets where Starlink is viable, they have no effective competition, and can charge as much as the market will bear. As long as they have more potential users than bandwidth to sell them, they are under no pressure to reduce prices or give up profit. A goal to subsidize Martian colonization provides a very strong incentive to maximize income. We should expect to see very high gross margins until other constellations begin to compete.

Yea let's not serve an area because their only option could potentially overcharge them! Completely ignoring the fact that you can't define an overcharge without alternative options. Current sat internet is orders of magnitude more expensive for a much worse service. Starlink is literally breaking monopolies and your worry is that it's going to be a monopoly itself.

I suspect this is why starlink has some base station licenses in eastern parts of Newfoundland. It’s the closest you can get to London before swimming from Contiguous North America.

They also need them there for current architecture up and back service to rural Atlantic Canada.

You’d build more central for that though, no? Otherwise you’re just covering a lot of ocean (until inter-sat links are up and running).

You would cover a lot of ocean but you'd also cover all of rural Newfoundland. I believe there's also a site somewhere in Nova Scotia. Dozens of starlink earth stations are now up and running.

Is there any real world test data out for going over the laser interlinks yet? I know there have been Elon Musk tweets on the topic, but he tends to tweet from a spherical cow engineering world when looking at future specs. From very early on the "much lower latency due to the speed of light in a vacuum" posts have been repeated but there is a non negligible number of routing decisions and hops in the starlink mesh and the additional 1100-2200km entry/exit, as well as bandwidth and handover limitations.

London/New York doesn't seem like the distance that there is going to be huge wins for back bone connected entities. But I guess that even if you can land a percentage of packets quicker via starlink, then there is some value in the trading world?

Let's look at numbers. NYC->LDN great-circle distance is 5576 km. At altitude, that is (3959+547)/3959 * 5576 = 6346 km. Idealized path is thus 547 * 2 + 6346 = 7420 km. (Actually a bit less because the path is part of a polygon, not an arc.) Non-ideal path, for satellites not directly overhead, is more like 7900 km, worst case more. Still, transit time, light through vacuum, is <28 ms.

Compare to fiber. Best ping time is 76 ms, or 38 ms one way. So, our budget margin is 10 ms. Suppose, instead of a direct downlink, packets are dumped to a nearby hub and carried via 1000 km of fiber to the destination, with various routing delays, adding 5 ms, leaving a 5 ms lead, 5000 microseconds.

In finance, we say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. That is because in a microsecond we can do >1k multiplications. 5 ms is time for >5M multiplications, many more than needed to evaluate a position and choose a response.

The only routing choices are which satellite to uplink to, and whether to forward or downlink each packet. Whatever choices are made don't need to be re-evaluated more than per second. Packet queuing delay can be negligible; modern switching equipment will start forwarding a packet while the rest is still arriving; this would happen when forwarding via laser link.

The latency advantage for New York/London/Frankfurt <-> Singapore/Tokyo/Hong Kong would be even more compelling.

that crap should be banned... if only rich folk can do these trades it is not fair for everyone else.

Who ever said it is fair?

There are many things rich people can do, poor cannot. You gotta have money, to make (real) money. Thats the harsh truth and most of us who do not have it, have to struggle hard, to make some wealth and very, very hard and be very lucky and gifted, to get rich by it (without negating all ethics).

Isn't some of the futility if that struggle due to the theft-by-design that central bank led inflation causes, along with their reliance on the government education systems continuing to fail to educate people on his money actually works?

That’s what public companies are for. Lots of not necessarily rich people pool their money to become one very rich entity

Or anyway taxed.

The profit from trading securities is definitely already taxed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com