If you are subscribed to Starlink (internet), what is it like when relying on satellite connection for both online live service play (as in multiplayer) and casual gaming? I’ve heard that star link internet sucks, is the subscription even worth the money? How well does satellite connection hold up in comparison to oceanic fiber optic cable internet? (Which is the most common form of connecting for the majority as it’s been around longer).
The comparison to subsea cables can’t be made yet, because Starlink doesn’t work that way yet. You are routed up to a reachable satellite maybe at most one or two hops over the inter satellite laser links to other satellites (but it’s hard to confirm anything concrete), and then quickly back down to the next reachable ground station. From there it’s fiberoptics.
I’ve been thinking more about this: It seems unlikely they will ever provide a significant portion of intercontinental traffic, even if there is some latency benefit. The fundamental issue is one of bandwidth. You can stuff fiber optics full of data in ways most lay people wouldn’t believe. Using different frequencies you can put many data channels parallel. 88 x 200 Gigabit/s per fiber is no issue at all with components we bought 5-10 years ago already for our use case on land, and spectral efficiency is still getting better. A typical subsea cable will have around 8 fiber pairs, so 8 x 88 x 200 G in both directions for one cable is probably normal.
The intersatellite links on Starlink satellites are reportedly also at 200G, and there are three of them on there, but intended to go to different neighbors I think. I’m not familiar with the specifics of free space optics, but I expect both wavelength division multiplexing and space division multiplexing will be much harder.
So only applications where latency is really critical will probably be able to buy into that limited intercontinental bandwith. High frequency trading maybe. And then diplomacy and military, where the tapping resistance plays a bigger role than the latency.
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The comparison to subsea cables can’t be made yet, because Starlink doesn’t work that way yet. You are routed up to a reachable satellite maybe at most one or two hops over the inter satellite laser links to other satellites (but it’s hard to confirm anything concrete), and then quickly back down to the next reachable ground station. From there it’s fiberoptics.
I’ve been thinking more about this: It seems unlikely they will ever provide a significant portion of intercontinental traffic, even if there is some latency benefit. The fundamental issue is one of bandwidth. You can stuff fiber optics full of data in ways most lay people wouldn’t believe. Using different frequencies you can put many data channels parallel. 88 x 200 Gigabit/s per fiber is no issue at all with components we bought 5-10 years ago already for our use case on land, and spectral efficiency is still getting better. A typical subsea cable will have around 8 fiber pairs, so 8 x 88 x 200 G in both directions for one cable is probably normal.
The intersatellite links on Starlink satellites are reportedly also at 200G, and there are three of them on there, but intended to go to different neighbors I think. I’m not familiar with the specifics of free space optics, but I expect both wavelength division multiplexing and space division multiplexing will be much harder.
So only applications where latency is really critical will probably be able to buy into that limited intercontinental bandwith. High frequency trading maybe. And then diplomacy and military, where the tapping resistance plays a bigger role than the latency.