Starlink's Laser System Is Beaming 42 Million GB of Data Per Day (pcmag.com) 97
SpaceX revealed that it's delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, according to engineer Travis Brashears. "We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers," Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window." PCMag reports: Although Starlink uses radio waves to beam high-speed internet to customers, SpaceX has also been outfitting the company's satellites with a "laser link" system to help drive down latency and improve the system's global coverage. The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link, are especially crucial to helping the satellites fetch data when no SpaceX ground station is near, like over the ocean or Antarctic. Instead, the satellite can transmit the data to and from another Starlink satellite in Earth's orbit, forming a mesh network in space.
Tuesday's talk from Brashears revealed the laser system is quite robust, even as the equipment is flying onboard thousands of Starlink satellites constantly circling the Earth. Despite the technical challenges, the company has achieved a laser "link uptime" at over 99%. The satellites are constantly forming laser links, resulting in about 266,141 "laser acquisitions" per day, according to Brashears' presentation. But in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time, and even reach transmission rates at up to 200Gbps.
Brashears also said Starlink's laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long "it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth," he said, before the connection broke. "Another really fun fact is that we held a link all the way down to 122 kilometers while we were de-orbiting a satellite," he said. "And we were able to downstream the video." During his presentation, Brashears also showed a slide depicting how the laser system can deliver data to a Starlink dish in Antarctica through about seven different paths. "We can dynamically change those routes within milliseconds. So as long as we have some path to the ground [station], you're going to have 99.99% uptime. That's why it's important to get as many nodes up there as possible," he added.
Tuesday's talk from Brashears revealed the laser system is quite robust, even as the equipment is flying onboard thousands of Starlink satellites constantly circling the Earth. Despite the technical challenges, the company has achieved a laser "link uptime" at over 99%. The satellites are constantly forming laser links, resulting in about 266,141 "laser acquisitions" per day, according to Brashears' presentation. But in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time, and even reach transmission rates at up to 200Gbps.
Brashears also said Starlink's laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long "it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth," he said, before the connection broke. "Another really fun fact is that we held a link all the way down to 122 kilometers while we were de-orbiting a satellite," he said. "And we were able to downstream the video." During his presentation, Brashears also showed a slide depicting how the laser system can deliver data to a Starlink dish in Antarctica through about seven different paths. "We can dynamically change those routes within milliseconds. So as long as we have some path to the ground [station], you're going to have 99.99% uptime. That's why it's important to get as many nodes up there as possible," he added.
Meh (Score:2, Funny)
Would have been more impressive if it was over 9000 lasers.
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Sharks. (Score:3)
Can we mount the Laser "ground" station to a shark ?
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Can we mount the Laser "ground" station to a shark ?
Would have to be a land shark.
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Can we mount the Laser "ground" station to a shark ?
Better still, build the Starlink sats in the shape of a shark.
Which, to be honest, I'm surprised Elon hasn't done already.
Space Sharks. With Lasers. (Score:2)
Space Sharks. With Lasers.
We need those.
Gave Me a Flashback (Score:3)
Re: Gave Me a Flashback (Score:1)
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Re: Gave Me a Flashback (Score:1)
Time to go binge rewatch... (Score:3)
... all those Dunning-Kruger Youtube videos from people like "Thunderf00t" and "Common Sense Skeptic" insisting that Starlink is a nonsensical illogical pipe dream con job, and particularly mocking the lasers in specific.
Re:Time to go binge rewatch... (Score:4, Interesting)
... all those Dunning-Kruger Youtube videos from people like "Thunderf00t" and "Common Sense Skeptic" insisting that Starlink is a nonsensical illogical pipe dream con job, and particularly mocking the lasers in specific.
Thunderf00t is... ah what words best describe him? I've had a few people rave about him, but from what I can tell he's half right, and all strident. Topics within his area of expertise, which like so many personalities are much narrower than they'd like, he'd accurate. For topics outside his area, he's every bit as opinionated, but it's a bit more of a crapshoot. And obnoxiously condescending either way. He definitely had/has opinions on Anita Sarkeesian. Really weird ones.
He's also not very good at arguing and debating. The (very small) bits I've seen of his anti religion debates are just painful. He's bad bad at debating. He's not wrong, but doesn't mean he's not terrible at it. And still superior about it.
Ah yes. Tedious, that's the word!
Re:Time to go binge rewatch... (Score:4, Interesting)
The irony is that he's way more like Musk than he'd like to admit. He has certain fields of competence that he's done very well in, but wrongly translates that into "any technical field I look into I'm as equally competent to judge as people whose entire educational and professional careers have focused on this issue". Interpreting yourself as "smart" based on your successes, and then assuming that "smart" means you're good at everything. Dunning-Kruger is a common problem among nerds, and both Thunderf00t and Musk have a strong proclivity towards it.
It also seems IMHO to be a good way to build an audience. Because if a lot of the audience sees you as "smart", then they tend to trust you even on the topics that you have little experience with, even over actual experts in those fields. Again, same issue with both Thunderf00t and Musk.
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In TFS, I see: ...and...
> We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,
> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link
Which is it?
What's the problem? The lasers aren't running at maximum data transfer speed continuously. My internet connection is 100 Mb/sec, but if you calculate it by dividing my download per day by the number of seconds in a day, it's a lot less than that.
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Ah, come on, you are exaggerating.
You have to count the zero bits, too!
Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio waves. (Score:1, Informative)
Although Starlink uses radio waves to beam high-speed internet to customers, SpaceX has also been outfitting the company's satellites with a "laser link" system to help drive down latency and improve the system's global coverage.
LASERs (Light Amplitude by Stimulated Emission of Raditaition) has exactly the same latency as radio waves in the same medium, which conveniently is the same as the speed of ligith in the medium or 'C'. So, no, SpaceX engineer dude, you don't get lower latency using LASERs than radio unless you mount them on a shark like in Austin Powers.
It takes processing time and power to route or switch that data, and whether you're using layer-2 switching or layer-3 routing, it needs conversion from light or radio to
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So, no, SpaceX engineer dude, you don't get lower latency using LASERs than radio unless you mount them on a shark like in Austin Powers.
Nah, LASERs mounted on sharks have actually more latency since speed of light in water is ~0.75 c maybe even a little less in salted water. By the way speed of light in optic fiber is about ~0.66 c.
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And fibre links often take you in the wrong direction. And even backbone hops are generally (excepting trans-oceanic links) much more frequent than "thousands of kilometers".
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Speed and latency are related but two different things.
Latency usually comes from hops in routers/bridges.
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You are confusing the width of the pipe (capacity, Mbps) with "speed". In the case I stated (sharks with LASERs), speed is the same as latency. /s
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No, latency is the time between question and answer.
Or if you want to half it, the time a package needs to reach its destination.
And speed is in fact measured as throughput - even if it is physically incorrect.
Re:Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wave (Score:5, Informative)
"Internet engineer dude", you might be advised to note that the laser links enable them to reduce the number of ground hops, and thus, yes, do reduce latency. The path is no longer:
User -> Starlink -> Ground station near the user -> numerous hops and ground-based transmission speeds (sub-C) for international routing, often going in the wrong direction -> local routing -> destination
But rather:
User -> Starlink -> thousands of kilometer transmissions at speed C, always in the right direction -> ground station near the destination -> local routing -> destination
And even if there were the case where laser transmission would be worse (such as Starlink congestion), they can still elect to use the old approach, so the worst case is no change in latency. But the general case is improved latency.
Re:Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wave (Score:4, Informative)
What he was saying was that using lasers gives no latency advantage over using radio to do the same job.
However true that is he was still wrong because you don't want to be mucking up near earth space with point to point radio comms, the lasers won't affect communications with any other spacecraft which is why they are good.
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Re:Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wave (Score:4, Interesting)
At the moment it seems like congestion on the Starlink shared RF frequencies is the main limiting factor, as ping times are on average rather poor compared to fibre. That's one of the reasons why they didn't get the contract for rural broadband deployment. I think that's always going to be the limiting factor, as Starlink will always be trying to have as many subscribers as they can with a tolerable level of latency in any given area.
For most sites these days there is no need to go long distances, they are served up from CDNs close to the user. And by close I mean on the network, not necessarily physically.
Re: Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wav (Score:5, Informative)
Not everything can be served by a CDN.
Starlink latency is actually pretty good, it's better than Cable was 5-10 years ago most of the time, often close to the fibre connection I have now.
I've had a number of Teams calls with people using Starlink and it's only occasionally noticeable. Based on the quality of a couple calls yesterday I'd say Starlink is exceeding a couple of other provides around here too.
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I don't know whose cable you were using, but average for Starlink is around 50ms. About 2 decades ago when I first got cable, it was around 15ms. My current FTTP is around 1-2ms, and even with the VPN on I see less than 5ms to google.com.
For reference, the round trip time to the satellite and down to the ground is 3.7ms, so no matter what it can never be as fast as fibre. The satellite's are at 550km, so it's a 1,100km round trip in the very best case where the satellite is directly overhead both the dish a
Re: Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wa (Score:2)
I don't know whose cable you were using, but average for Starlink is around 50ms. About 2 decades ago when I first got cable, it was around 15ms.
That can't be right, back then docsis generally put you at 60ms by the time you get to your ISPs border router due to the shitty multiplexing they used. Sure, if you played quake with somebody on your same node you'd get 5ms, but passing through the CMTS added a much higher cost.
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No your shitty ISP did something wrong. I remember having sub 40ms from my DOCSIS 1.0 modem back in the days when 3mbps was considered "broadband"
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The first "broadband" (64kBit - you could double two lines for 128kBit) in Germany was ISDN. It still exists.
Latency was below 10ms, often below 5ms.
While latency is affected by the bandwidth, it is basically only based on the number of hops and how much such a hop delays forwarding the packages.
With DSL I used to have ping times/latency in the 30ms range. Did not really matter which side of the globe the other person was. But now I'm in Thailand. Inside Thailand internet is superb. But the interconnects ar
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ping time of 30 ms on the other side of the globe for a round trip? LOL!
20000/300000*2 .13332
so 133ms at the speed of light in a vacuum in direct line with no hops...
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learn to read.
Other side of the globe is obviously not a literal ment phrase.
Your formular has no units, so no idea what it is supposed to calculate.
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new to things like the circumference of the globe, the speed of light and how to calculate ping times I see:
20000 km / 300000 km/s * 2 (ping is round trip) = 133 ms
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learn to read.
By the way, I suspect it's guys like yourself who give java such a bad reputation. Interface and factory hell and what not, I suspect I might have a good laugh looking at your java code if you ever wrote any.
I have been programming in java since 1997 and supervising java programming teams, including being the CVS/git master since 2000 and it bothers me some. Glad I could express myself a little and get it off my worries some.
Thanks,
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learn to read.
By the way, I suspect it's guys like yourself who give java such a bad reputation. Interface and factory hell and what not, I suspect I might have a good laugh looking at your java code if you ever wrote any.
P.S. You seem to suggest you have or know about it at least:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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Yeah, and all your numbers are wrong.
The circumference of the globe is 42,000km for example.
And the ping distance is 2x via a stationary satellite, which is roughly 32,000 km.
So, you still do not grasp that I was figurative speaking?
As the other side of the globe from my place is in the middle of the ocean.
We did not talk about ping time, we talked about latency, or did I say ping by accident? Perhaps I did, mea culpa then.
So if you want a formular with comments, it would be:
circumference = 42,000km
speed of
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You are obviously hopeless! others have noted it to you, but no, you don't seem to listen to anybody!
Yeah, and all your numbers are wrong.
The circumference of the globe is 42,000km for example.
40,007.863 km / 40,075.017 km
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And the ping distance is 2x via a stationary satellite, which is roughly 32,000 km.
You never mentioned satellites connection in Thailand and low Earth orbit satellites are below 10ms
So, you still do not grasp that I was figurative speaking?
As the other side of the globe from my place is in the middle of the ocean.
Easy to say after the fact: "oh I was only speaking figuratively so never mind what I wrote"
We did not talk about ping time, we talked about latency, or did I say ping by accident? Perhaps I did, mea culpa then.
So if you want a formular with comments, it would be:
ping is used to measure latency
https://cloud.google.com/blog/... [google.com]
circumference = 42,000km
speed of light = 3000000km/s
circumference / speed of light yields (I trust your number), 133ms.
So:
You are wrong again, the speed of light in a vacuum is 300000km/s, not 3000000km/s as you ju
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You seem to be an idiot. But good in counting zeros.
So I wrote 3000000 but was meant to write 300000.
And you spotted it.
Good eyes, Kudos, I would not have spotted such an error/typo.
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Oh! That was a typo? I thought that you were figuratively speaking. Thanks for the feedback and for the compliments.
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With DSL I used to have ping times/latency in the 30ms range. Did not really matter which side of the globe the other person was.
No, you had ping times like that within your local city. DSL is good and all, but it never actually broke the laws of physics which is absolutely what would be required to get to the other side of the world in 30ms.
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No, that are ping times to Amsterdam or Paris. The computer centers of EvE Online are in Amsterdam, the Servers for World of Warcraft are in Paris.
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While latency is affected by the bandwidth, it is basically only based on the number of hops and how much such a hop delays forwarding the packages.
Latency is not affected at all by the bandwidth and is completely independent from the bandwidth unless you buffer bloat which can easily be prevented with traffic shaping, I use linux htb (hierarchy token buckets) queue discipline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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My current FTTP is roughly 18ms to various places (Google, Slashdot, SoylentNews), and to Amazon is 32ms. To sears.com (no particular reason other than the name jumped into my head) is 12ms.
Back when I had Cable, my ping was in the 50ms range for a variety of places.
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Ping to Europe is 250ms. While fiber is also available here (on a different island) the fiber has contracted different ISP for its path to Europe which is then about median RTT 380ms with higher packetloss and RTT going even up to 800ms.
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it's better than Cable was 5-10 years ago most of the time, often close to the fibre connection I have now.
You had incredibly crap cable 10 years ago and incredibly crap fibre connections now. Based on just a cursory Google it seems Starlink can't compete with my cable connection from back in 2001 latency wise (though it does have more bandwidth).
Re:Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wave (Score:4, Informative)
YAY for StarLink but no yay for pretending LASERs make this lower latency than radio.
But you're misinterpreting what he said. The radio part is the satellite to user and satellite to server links. The lasers allow direct satellite-to-satellite links. The satellites didn't previously communicate via satellite-to-satellite radio links, they communicated by satellite-to-ground links. Lower latency is not because light is faster than radio waves, but because the satellite to satellite links are faster than the satellite to ground-relay to fiber link.
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Damn! I always thought lasers are faster than radio waves!
Silly me!
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Re: Sharks carry lasers. Same latency as radio wav (Score:2)
You're correct that radio and laser travels at the same speed.
Laser benefits:
Orders of magnitudes more bandwidth.
The beam can be made tight and focused, so the beam doesn't get seen/heard by every satellite in the general direction it gets pointed.
Smaller equipment than what's needed for a focused radio beam (which is still very wide).
Laser cons: Blocked or severely weakened by everything that isn't space. They said they held a link that cut through atmosphere at 30km altitude, which is still very high up,
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Ironic this post comes right below the one talking about nerds and their susceptibility to Dunning-Kruger.
The lasers provide satellite to satellite communication. That allows a given packet to move laterally in orbit instead of having to go up, down to a ground station, then over a fibre line. The packet travels a shorter distance, so latency is less. Just as the Starlink engineer said.
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The light in a fibre line also travels 30% slower than the light in space between the satellites.
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too expensive for this poorboy (Score:2)
Re:too expensive for this poorboy (Score:4, Informative)
It might still be a best bang for the buck bargain depending on where you are. They are other solutions like, a friend of mine set up his own wireless link (WISP type) between his house and his camp in the woods 75 miles away (he gets about 500 Mbps) where no other signal is available but in many cases, Starlink is still the best solution.
By the way. Starlink was designed for those hard to connect places and not intended for where other solutions are available so they may very well always stay above other solution prices to insure they don't get overloaded so it might take a very long time before the prices come down to terrestrial service and will probably never happen.
Cost is relative. As are needs. (Score:4, Insightful)
150 a month for a basic mobile account, it has to come down to the same as terrestrial mobile service before i can afford it
I doubt the costs will drop, for the same reason a Porsche 911 costs far more than a Toyota Corolla to buy and maintain. They're not the same product, even if they do serve the same purpose.
Those that need satellite-based anything, are going to pay more, unless the provider is being subsidized or generous.
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The price has went up twice since I got Starlink, it started at $100/mo and is now $120.
Re: Cost is relative. As are needs. (Score:2)
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Yes the email telling me mine was going up said the service price is going down in some places.
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My two Starlinks have each gone down to $90/month.
Really? Why is that, and what region are you in?
Mine (mobile option) is still $150 per month.
Re:Cost is relative. As are needs. (Score:4, Interesting)
150 a month for a basic mobile account, it has to come down to the same as terrestrial mobile service before i can afford it
I doubt the costs will drop, for the same reason a Porsche 911 costs far more than a Toyota Corolla to buy and maintain. They're not the same product, even if they do serve the same purpose.
Those that need satellite-based anything, are going to pay more, unless the provider is being subsidized or generous.
Good point, bad analogy... I'd say the better comparison is between a Toyota Land Cruiser (J70) and a Toyota Corolla... The J70 LC is far more expensive because it can drive to the arse end of the earth and back where as the Corolla struggles with unpaved roads. It seems daft because the J70 is the last Toyota model to receive upgrades (it only got LED lights last year), until you consider that it's service life is expected to be several decades and it needs to be repairable with twine and duct tape in the Antarctic.
I digress, you're right that satellite connections are for places where terrestrial connections are not available... Otherwise you'd be using the terrestrial connection which would be cheaper and faster (lower latency). You're also right that they end up being subsidised or go out of business (then someone else buys up the corpse cheaply and tries to get subsidised again). The history of satellite internet is littered with the corpses of failed businesses.
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150 a month for a basic mobile account, it has to come down to the same as terrestrial mobile service before i can afford it
I doubt the costs will drop, for the same reason a Porsche 911 costs far more than a Toyota Corolla to buy and maintain. They're not the same product, even if they do serve the same purpose.
I think the price will go down, but not until Starship is flying. Starship will enormously reduce the primary cost of maintaining and expanding the Starlink fleet. In general, process improvements that reduce cost don't necessarily prompt businesses to lower their prices, but in this case reducing the price will expand the customer base (e.g. adding FudRucker and tens, maybe hundreds, of millions more), so lowering the price will increase profit. At the moment, the system is still quite capacity-constraine
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They had better be reinvesting some of their current profits in capacity buildouts of their own.
Yeah, they should, but it's not likely. With the current game of Executive Musical Chairs almost everyone in the E-suites except the secretaries will be off looting some other company in 5-10 years, they don't see the value in spending money now that would reduce the value of their stock grants.
Comparison (Score:2)
I was looking at Hughes satellite internet for my in-law's cabin in the middle of nowhere, and it's roughly the same price as Starlink once you add in all the fees and other nonsense. It's also a *lot* slower and has much worse coverage.
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For our other home in Peru we can use horrible Hughes Satellite connections for (IIRC) $150-$180/month, or Starlink, or extremely congested 3/4G connection that barely allows for streaming music (sometimes). When we start spending more than a month at a time there you can probably guess which we'll choose.
Millions and Millions! (Score:2)
48 Million Gb
If only we had a word for Millions of Millions of bytes...
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Or millions and millions of bits, as per your quote.
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That much pr0n. (Score:2)
Stop watching that much pr0n.
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in other unrelated news, the french meaning for the word "bit" is dick.
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48 Million Gb
If only we had a word for Millions of Billions of bytes...
FTFY
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No, no, no ... Bazillagajillion
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Big honkin' piles of bits . . .
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"Ground station" has been in use for a long time and is the correct term.
Sigh. (Score:1)
Hold on.
My workplace has 10gig connections. There are hundreds of desktops. I think it would be possible for me to do these kinds of numbers, because that's a dumb way of adding it up - saying that you have 9000 x 100Gbps lasers, in fact, makes those numbers not all that great.
Now... more interesting - what's the actual used bandwidth of unique traffic (not counting it three times because it bounces between three satellites), and the average download speed for users?
Because that's FAR more interesting to
A careful analysis of the data transmitted... (Score:1)
QQ (Score:1)
What does that add up to now, one (1), alt.binaries.* usenet feed? I haven't been following along. :)
Meh (Score:5, Funny)
Well, ok, that takes care of Microsoft's telemetry, but there is no bandwidth left over for actual work.
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Re: Meh (Score:2)
It is not a quote. It differs in words and meaning from the famous Franklin quote.
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Well, ok, that takes care of Microsoft's telemetry, but there is no bandwidth left over for actual work.
If you're using Microsoft, you're doing it wrong.
And we were able to downstream the video. (Score:2)
If only ... (Score:1)
Starlink's Laser System Is Beaming 42 Million GB of Data Per Day
Somebody should really come up with some prefixes for numbers greater than 10^9.
:-)