New submarine cable to link Japan, Europe, through famed Northwest Passage In the 15th century, European traders that hoped to reach Asia had problems: a round trip by land or sea took years and involved many lethal perils. Navigators of the day therefore imagined sailing the “Northwest Passage,” a route across the Atlantic, then over the top of North America, before sliding south to Japan. Sadly, …
I wonder if the backers of this have done their homework?
Phase 2 of Starlink will be going live shortly, that's the bit where the satellites use frickin' lasers to make inter-continental latencies rather lower than can be achieved by terrestrial fibre (because the speed of light in a vacuum is much faster than the speed of light in optical fibre).
Sure, the satellite systems aren't so good for really big bulk data transfers that fibre can handle well, but those don't tend to be latency sensitive, so they can go via the established routes.
Still, more connectivity is always good, so good luck to them.
GJC
Its probably harder to shoot down an undersea cable, plus there is a possibility eventually of legislation limiting satellite constellations.
With billionaires willy waving their way into space plus others thinking to make money from connecting remote hunter/gatherers to tik tok, space will become too busy for sensible users.
While undersea cables are safe from most conventional weapons, but they're pretty vulnerable to something as simple as a boat dragging it's anchor in the wrong place. Also, where they come on-shore, all it takes is a JCB digging in the wrong/right place.
I'm pretty sure any country able to attack satellites also has submarines they could use to attack cables as well.
Trouble with satellite is that either :
They are whizzing about very fast (from our viewpoint) and hence you have "significant" challenges with very frequent handovers from one bird to the next. That will potentially cause frequent but very short drops or pauses in traffic, as well as variable latency.
Or they are very high up in which case you have massive latency getting the traffic between the birds and the ground. Many of us will remember the days when international phone calls went via satellite - and the round trip latency of (from dim and vague memory) around a second made interactive conversations "interesting".
Or somewhere in-between so you get both problems.
Well, the longest direct (great circle) distance possible on Earth is -- pretty much by definition -- 20,000km. Assuming various delays double that, the maximum latency would be around 40000/300000 sec = 0.133 sec = 133 msec. Annoying, but not intolerable for most usage I think. And, of course, typical delays possibly would be less. How often do most of us talk to our antipodes?
Of course, there's no guarantee that Starlink when fully loaded will have latencies as low as 133 msec. 133msec is just a number that might, maybe, be achievable.
There's also latency between Earth stations and final destinations. So if there's no station in Alaska, traffic might end up going via terrestrial capacity from somewhere else in N.America. There's also the additional challenge with peering and transit connections between Starlink's cloud and the rest of the Internet.
I'm curious about how routing will work when there's hundreds of fast moving nodes. Normally IGPs assume a relatively static network topology. I guess orbital paths could be semi-stable, ie a ring rotating and path between satellites in that orbit being relatively fixed. Creating a moving mesh will be an interesting challenge though. As more beta customers sign up, there should be more data regarding latency, asymmetry and reliability of UDP traffic.
> if there's no station in Alaska, traffic might end up going via terrestrial capacity from somewhere else in N.America
I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're not doing all this just to get high speed access from Europe to the 400,000 people on the southern coast of Alaska... I'm also pretty confident there will be a few Starlink stations in Asia and Europe.
Yup. The recent Musk missive to staff about potential SpaceX bankrupty had an interesting comment. Apparently the business case for v1 satellites is shaky due to capacity constraints. And to solve that, they need v2. But those can't be launched from Falcon, or Falcon Heavy. So seemed like there's a big dependency on fixing their Raptor problem. And then launching a Starship evey 2 weeks to build their v2 constellation.
Then there's politcs. So SpaceX has been heavily subsidised to solve the rural broadband problem. I stumbled across the YT channel of one of the characters from Bering Sea Gold. Vid showed the cost of living in Nome, Alaska which included being charged $800/month for broadband. Which is the problem with serving rural locations. Starlink should save subscribers money, but as you say, probably won't result in HFTs setting up in Nome.
Yes latency will vary due to path changes and handovers, however it should still beat an undersea cable over a long distance. For high frequency trading arbitrage this is enough. If the latency variation was a problem you could simple introduce a variable delay to pad it out to a constant value that was still better than the undersea cable.
If Starlink latency proves to be genuinely better than undersea fibre, one use-case will be high frequency stock and commodities trading. That was what spurred the first near straight line fibre connection in the US. This movie is on my Xmas streaming list:
The Hummingbird Project
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6866224/
One option is to put your high-frequency traders in the middle of the fibre link, say, in Resolute. The data packets can meet in the middle between London and Tokyo (or Paris/Shanghai or what have you).
I'm sure the 198 current inhabitants of Resolute (English name), also known as Qausuittuq (ᖃᐅᓱᐃᑦᑐᖅ) would love to have the likes of a Wolf of Wall Street in their midst. Or even two.
" one use-case will be high frequency stock and commodities trading."
This has been postulated as the real moneyspinner long term for Starlink. Transatlantic latency would be significantly lower than anything cable can do whilst transpacific is simply unbeatable even with polar cables
fibre has bigger bandwidth than satellites
Almost all the existing europe/asia big data cables cross the Sinai and have proven susceptable to dragging anchors at the north end of the Red Sea. IIRC there was an event where ONE ship knocked out 4 cables in 20 minutes whilst waiting to transit the Suez Canal
Landbased cables have their own sets of problems and vulnerabilities no matter how hard operators try (where diggers don't succeed in screwing things up, thieves do it instead)
This is sorely needed geographic diversity
We should never have chopped Goonhilly in Cornwall. Putin is already threatening to chop our internet cables and our gas over Ukraine.
Of course, these days, it would be better to have 1000 micro-Goonhillies communicating over Starlink or similar.
WSPR anyone? :-)) We will soon be back to short wave and the Lincolnshire poacher.
didn't Putin's mob demonstrate downing a satellite just recently?
I vaguely recall having read several stories of someone or other demonstrating that they have the capability. But even without hostile action, there is a worry amongst many experts in the field that it's getting a bit crowded up there - especially in the geo-stationary orbit. All it could take is for one bird to be hit by a bit of the millions of bits of man-made shrapnel up there (not to mention bits of rock) to hit one bird, and that could set off a chain reaction as more and more shrapnel is produced which destroys whatever's left at an increasing rate.
If that happened, then \<sarcasm mode\>civilisation as we know it would end. All those who got rid of their terrestrial telly dish would be without telly - and for those of use still using terrestrial, some material might be slower arriving on our channels. Hordes of zombies would be unable to drive anywhere through lack of directions from the electronic back seat driver.
If that happened, then \<sarcasm mode\>civilisation as we know it would end. All those who got rid of their terrestrial telly dish would be without telly - and for those of use still using terrestrial, some material might be slower arriving on our channels. Hordes of zombies would be unable to drive anywhere through lack of directions from the electronic back seat driver.
That sounds like an improvement.
Given how Russia keeps reducing flow to the Nord pipelines for EU gas, trusting any internet cable that was designed/built by Russia or passed over their territory is a Bad Idea.
Can only imagine how every single data packet on those cables is recorded in a Russia Datacenter somewhere, for when tech catches up to encryption cracking.
Whilst the Americans will capture these packets anyway. Guarding the Guardians.
The late Constantine Fitzgibbon would be expecting this, as in the mirror theory of the two superpowers...
Not that Russia is still a superpower --- not that that stops the Yank Imperium.
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As for Nordstreams I & II, poor demented old Cruz has made a deal with his equal idiot Schumer [ the latter got easy confirmations of putative ambassadors * in return ] to have a vote in the US Congress in January to discuss imposing still further sanctions on what essentially is none of America's business.
Equivalent to London screaming like bables over a private transaction between someone in Nigeria and someone in Malaysia. Nordstream will run and run.
Still while there are sunk costs, Russia can cool it on supply at her own timing for now.
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* Amongst these Ambassadors are People's Representatives, horny of hand and powerful of mind, democratic voices to guide the weak and powerless: Caroline Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel.
Yes - Nordstream seems to be a logical response to having one of the main existing traffic routes - through Ukraine - now traversing hostile territory. So, the traffic has been routed around the problem.
This causes a big problem for Ukraine,as the transit payments of a few $Bn per year look like they're going to stop in 2024. That is going to put a big hole in the local corruption gravy train. Ergo, Ukraine is currently kicking up as big a stink as possible to stop it.
The frankly hysterical reaction of the US to Nordstream 2 (Threatening to individually sanction the mayor of the German town where it comes ashore? WTF?) makes me think that some important people there must also be hit in the pocket by the impending cutoff.
"This causes a big problem for Ukraine..."
It's what you mention, and more. Right now Europe will kick off if gas supply to Ukraine is interrupted or Ukraine is "properly" invaded. Once Europe gets most of its gas through Nord Stream, they're not gonna give a f if Russia invades Ukraine or cuts off the gas (which would kill thousands of people in winter). Europe has inadvertently sacrificed its buffer state.
Much of the politics is probably around the US protecting it's own exports. The shale boom lead to building LNG export terminals on the east and west coast. If the EU buys Russian gas, US east coast terminals have a smaller market.
Then there's policy failures. So Germany's decision to close it's nuclear plants, along with other countries either closing their plants per policy, or just reaching end of life. So quite a lot of GW of firm capacity exiting the market, and being replaced with expensive and unreliable 'renewables'. And at the same time, decarbonisation policies will massively increase demand for electricity. Given 'renewables' intermittentcy, that will also increase demand for gas for stand-by generation.
So basically a bunch of policy failures landing on energy users. Plus market failures, like Germany having the EU's largest gas storage, which is rapidly emptying. Luckily it's been a mild winter so far, but if it turns cold, there will be problems. And in the UK, we're being told to bend over and expect a 50% increase in energy bills to pay for market and policy failures.
Plus market failures, like Germany having the EU's largest gas storage, which is rapidly emptying
We in independent UKistan have cleverly avoided this fate by already having the lowest gas storage in Europe. Just in Time !
2% of annual demand the last time I looked, compared with those scaredy-cats average of 20%.
I fully expect Boris to denounce them for hoarding.
Yeh, ISTR the UK producing it's own oil, gas and coal shielding us from the '70s oil crisis. But I need to dig deeper into gas. EU blames Russia, Russia says they're delivering everything that's been contracted. Curious if that means gas buyers didn't contract via the Yamal pipeline because they'd assumed Nordstream would be online. Regardless, if the problem is due to suppliers not booking enough gas, we shouldn't be rewarding them for failure.
Then again, creating a scarcity creates a price rise, and boosts profits. Probably why Enron bought a gas storage field before they imploded.
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