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Fiber latency is way lower and doesn’t require the sharing of ambient spectrum. Society loses little by curtailing for-profit retail ISP satellite deployment.



Not sure what you mean about ambient spectrum, but Starlink has better theoretical latency than fibre over large distances once they have inter-satellite laser links.

There are also huge areas of the Earth's surface that are hard to or not worth running fibre to. E.g. very remote areas or moving bodies like ships, motor homes and aircraft.

Those members of society wanting to live a more rural life will benefit directly. Those in countries without expensive infrastructure will also benefit.


Fiber optics obviously use light so I didn’t want to use the term ‘spectrum’ exclusively. The idea I want to communicate is that shared wireless channels have to be regulated by the FCC and similar groups.

Starlink presently has real-world latency that is comparable to VDSL in the best of cases. It is superior to other satellite-based networks that operate at higher altitudes, but not to terrestrial fiber optics if you compare like for like (ie, a comparison of theoretical maxima).

Obviously a ship would not be a good candidate for a fiber line. That said, many developing and/or rural communities will eventually get fiber anyway, so we as a society and as voters should push for a concerted effort to do it sooner rather than later. A good beachhead would be fiber to 5G base stations in remote areas. Latin America and Africa have surprisingly strong wireless data infrastructure. The existing market for distributing phones and wireless services (often a kiosk in a shopping center or a SIM card from a corner store) can also be used to distribute modems, no satellite dishes involved.

That’s not to say Starlink lacks utility, but it wouldn’t be my first suggestion for rural or developing areas. (For what it’s worth, I have lived in both.)


Fiber construction is $6,000/HHP for dense suburban deployment and much much higher for rural. So a meaningful chunk of the world's rural population may not be able to afford the NRE. Getting the world high speed Internet is going to require a battery of solutions. The real competition for LEO satcomms is a 5G cell site a few miles away with fiber backhaul.


For long distances satellite is in principle faster than fiber since the speed of light is significantly lower in the latter due to the high index of refraction.

Fiber's advantage is bandwidth.


The length of the hop is almost always far shorter with fiber though. With satellite, you have to go to space to receive Akamai-delivered content, game with other people in your neighborhood, or hit your ISP’s DNS cache. Don’t get so caught up in the physics that you forget to consider the implementation.


IMHO CDN nodes on the satellites themselves are just matter of time.


For periods of time varying from two to ten decades maybe...


The Starlink satellites weight about 200+ kg and have big solar arrays to power their electric thrusters. I'm sure they could squeeze in some space rated (or massively redundant) SSDs to provide some CDN capacity in some of the later revisions.


So who is paying for and laying this fiber to remote rural locations?


Government should be, like a utility.


Wouldn't that end up costing $300k+ per house when you get to the really remote areas? I know some people that had to pay that amount to get a few houses connected up, and they weren't that far from civilization. Hard to imagine there is political will to spend that much taxpayer money on such a small portion of the population when it looks like Starlink will provide decent internet for a tiny fraction of the cost.


But providing practically every service to a rural person is more expensive, but we do it anyway since we like to have a somewhat equal living standard for our rural citizens. Hell, the same goes for suburbs too. In many cities, poorer urban areas end up being net tax positive compared to suburbs because of the extensive amount of low-density infrastructure required outside the core.


I think it’s more likely that you’d lay fiber to a backbone of 5G base stations and rent wireless modems to customers. This would work fairly well in non-mountainous areas.


Yeah. If there were truly no other options, I'd certainly be in favor of a debate about bringing near-universal broadband to people, in the same manner as electricity and telephones.

Of course, that only applies country by country and presumably leaves poorer countries SOL.

However, given that we do seem to have a good option with the tradeoff that there will be more satellites in LEO, that seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. There are already a lot of satellites in orbit, to say nothing of planes, and a lot of light pollution. So this idea that we're besmirching the virgin night sky seems... overwrought.




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