Microwave and narrow focused point to point wifi is still definitely a thing in remote areas. Although with Starlink becoming very popular I wonder how long until new deployments decline.
I was thinking that they were way overdue to replace those microwave dishes with a Starlink terminal.
Starlink has to travel minimum of 550km twice + distance from ground station to destination server. For remote locations, you generally also have an additional satellite to satellite relay distance as well. So realistically say 1500km minimum, likely way higher. Speed of light time on that distance is ~5ms, and that doesn’t account for latency losses at each hop and also remember that’s one way time.
There’s a reason microwave is still used, even sometimes over fiber, where latency matters.
So it's about +10ms to your ping for nearby destinations, less (and potentially even faster) for more distant destinations. That's really not enough to worry about in most contexts; even for FPS gaming, unless you're a pro 10ms isn't a huge difference maker.
> There’s a reason microwave is still used, even sometimes over fiber, where latency matters.
Only for HFT as far as I know; latency mattering that much is a tiny niche.
You obviously live in a tech bubble. Remote industrial machine control definitely has concerns around guaranteed latency.
Oh, so you are finally conceding that Starlink doesn’t fit every use case? Because Starlink definitely goes down during a storm occasionally but a dedicated microwave link with high gain parabolic dishes won’t in the same conditions.
> I very much doubt there are any cases for remote industrial machine control where microwaves are the better option.
Oil and gas industry would beg to differ.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/yllqk6/space_lase... [2] https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/elon-musks-starlink-expands... [3] https://www.starlink.com/map