Chinese satellite beams data at 1Gbps, surpassing Starlink speed by 5 times

For context.

NASA's TBIRD mission demonstrated 200Gbps laser communications (in a tiny 6U form factor) to earth.

The Starlink inter-satellite laser links are 200Gbps space-to-space, and I believe the space-to-earth downlink of each Starlink V2 mini is 96 Gbps.

(June) In the SCP over the weekend (9 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377278

Starlink operates at ~500 Mbps (shared) today and they claim it will do 1 Gbps next year so I wouldn't say this Chinese demo is ahead.

will = future

is = present

But it literally is ahead though. How can you say it's not ahead when starlink does not have this capability right now?

Sure, they claim 1Gbps next year, at which point this Chinese demo won't be ahead ahead anymore.

How can you belittle a current achievement based on the uncertain claim of a future achievement from someone else?

Is the next step really is space based data centers?

No

Wow, we're now entering the era of Giga bit data transfer from space.