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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.
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.
Geostationary satelites at 38000±2000km distance take around 125ms up and the same back down for about 250ms for you to reach a server, maybe you were thinking of that. My uncle has that on his farm in Australia. It’s bad, you can’t have a good IP based phone call because the delay is too long, people keep starting to talk at the same time.
Starlink flies in low earth orbit 450 - 500 km, so maybe up to 1500 km distance from you if its at the edge of reachability, for a worst case. That’s 5 ms, or 10 ms from you to the server. At those low distances the buffering overhead of their system will dominate like with Wifi. I don’t know how it works for Starlink specifically.
I think the real killer issue for starlink and realtime tasks is the constantly changing latency, and the handoff between satellites.
I have a coworker occasionally on starlink. The big issue with both videoconferencing and I would assume also gaming, is the handover. Each satellite is in view only for around 90 second, then the antenna hast to switch to the next. This means that your latency keeps fluctuating and you drop packets every 90 seconds during the handover. It sounds miserable.
Can anyone fact check this
You could?
But I guess I will.
I can’t find any good source for him having bought Amazon forest. So that’s probably made up. However he seems to be buying and donating to conservation wooded land in the Appalachians.
https://appalachian.org/sahc-south-yellow-mountain-preserve/
In that last one he is being thanked for a particularly large land donation.
Yeah agreed especially further down when it’s just randomly rehashing old history. It’s also mixing up decryption and verification even in the beginning of the article. First they write:
BootROM (Level 0): The CPU runs code burned into it at the factory. This code is immutable (cannot be changed). It uses the ROM Keys to verify the signature of the next loader.
Then just two paragraphs below:
The ROM Keys change everything. With these keys, hackers can decrypt the Level 1 Bootloader.
So which is it? Usually bootloaders in a chain hash the next stage. That hash is compared with the signed hash the stage presents, and the signature on the signed hash is cryptographically verified against the locally stored trusted keys. No encryption or decryption takes place. Maybe this is different for the PS5 but then that would be noteworthy, not something you just assume readers to know.
Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:
- to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
- to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine
The download size difference of 7 GiB only costs me another 60-80s to download as long as the Steam servers are serving well. So funny enough the first option would be better for me.
some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales
Name and shame:
- Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
- Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo
What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.
Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.
That reminds me of something similar my ISP said. “Don’t be afraid of the bandwidth”, if you give your customers more bandwidth they aren’t actually going to fill it, they’ll still run roughly the same downloads just more quickly.
Here it’s at 12:10 in this video archive of their talk at RIPE: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/video/797/
And here when they gave the same talk at SwiNOG they also mentioned how their network ring in Wintherthur is still pretty much equally loaded after 10G and 25G home connections became available: https://youtu.be/wXmJCzMeIBo?t=1195
Up to the third comma, yes, but all the rest seems to go beyond that pretty arbitrarily.
When they say anything that “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”, and qualify that with “in the sole discretion of the Corporation” that just means “anything we don’t want to be associated with, and we will be the judge of that”.
That’s what makes it so vague, how is a Merchant or an Acquirer supposed to know what Mastercard might find damaging to the goodwill? They have to guess, or use trial and error*. Most will just err on the side of caution, which means customers get blocked from even more purchases, just to be safe.
* Or talk to Mastercard, which Valve apparently tried, but they wouldn’t respond.
Oh thanks, the second clip is actually here. I’ll fix it in parent in a minute.
The argument is utterly stupid.
Ignoring that it is building on a fantasy reality for the moment. Even if you had free healthcare, and if only the financial costs of survival motivated people to get jobs, then the other costs of living, like for food and shelter, would still provide that motivation.
I assembled the links for OPs entries:
ORB: Off-World Resource Base https://store.steampowered.com/app/281390/ORB/
Ookibloks https://store.steampowered.com/app/399910/Ookibloks/
Paper Monsters Recut https://store.steampowered.com/app/314540/Paper_Monsters_Recut/
Curse of the Crescent Isle DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/365120/Curse_of_the_Crescent_Isle_DX/
Space Moth DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/425340/Space_Moth_DX/
Z.A.R. https://store.steampowered.com/app/351820/ZAR/
Demon’s Crystals https://store.steampowered.com/app/454610/Demons_Crystals/
Hyper Sentinel https://store.steampowered.com/app/640880/Hyper_Sentinel/
Katana Soul https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028300/Katana_Soul/
Timberman: The Big Adventure https://store.steampowered.com/app/2589910/Timberman_The_Big_Adventure/
She answered that in her blog post that the Phoronix article links to: