I don't actually think latency would be that much worse.
replyOf course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour
You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency.
reply> speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum
replyThat made me wonder: Why can't we use vacuum cables?
(the sort of questions I should probably be bothering an LLM with.. someone should make a LMGPTTFY)
If you figure out how to make cheap vacuum cables you will probably become very rich.
replyBut otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)
Not vacuum but an inert gas: https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/fiber/Hollow-core-fiber.html
reply> Why can't we use vacuum cables?
replyHollow-core fiber is basically this!
> LMGPTTFY
"let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"?
latency lower for satellites, trading firms have looked at this already, no idea if anyone has actually done it
replybandwidth would indeed be worse
starlink sats are some of the lowest orbiting satellites in space - 330-370km for v3. this helps latency as well as easy deorbit at end of life. the v3 sats have multiple 400 gbps lasers for meshing... I can't decide if your comment is sarcasm or not actually because starlink is fully functional and doesn't have any of those issues
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