

Largest cruise liner gets outfitted with fiber like Internet - rpoo
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/1791

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adrianpike
Well damn. I misread the headline and already started thinking through how
aggressive you would have to cache if you were on a cruise liner, had a
satellite connection to the rest of the world, but had fiber across the ship
for guests.

Then I read how O3 does it - apparently the satellites track the ship and you
get a dedicated link. Good god that has to be expensive.

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rpoo
Definitely expensive..but compared to what exists now, probably worth it. How
else will people be able to upload vacation photos to instagram!

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carl_
"which delivers the reach of satellite and the SPEED and LATENCY of FIBER"

False marketing of the month!

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FireBeyond
Well, technically - if you're thousands of miles out to sea, bouncing a signal
to a satellite in orbit a few hundred kilometers above the earth may well
equal the speed and latency of an equivalent fiber connection...

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oliwarner
GEO is 22236 miles up. Consider that you'll usually be bouncing data at least
50000 miles through the lossy atmosphere. It's the distance and lost packets
that cause the main latency issues.

You could got for a LEO (upward of 500m) but they need much more power to stay
up and you need so many more satellites. It's not impossible but I would have
thought it to be prohibitively expensive for an ISP (or a cruise liner full of
oldies).

Not to mention that this thing is going to connect to a base station and
you're then your connection is in the hands of the actual fibre gods.

Compare that to a real connection: I have ADSL in the UK. I ping a server of
mine in California. ~5000miles in 130ms. You could spend billions on a peering
satellite network and your first hop (past any boat-board proxy) will still be
longer than a DSL equivalent's whole TCP connection.

Unless, that is, they're using unicorns to beam the data with fairy dust
neutrinos. That probably would be faster.

Note: I'm not saying annything about bandwidth. You _can_ get crazy-high
bandwidth through a P2P dish, but latency has always been an issue when you're
dealing with orbits and the atmosphere.

