Bonus features: Sony uses Blu-ray tech to simulate 466Mbps laser link from the stratosphere to space

Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) and the Japanese space agency have conducted an experiment to transmit data from the stratosphere to space and declared the results promising as a complete file was delivered at 446 megabits per second. Data networking is hard in space, because distances and latency are substantial and …

[Kevin McMurtrie]

What?

Sony's PR is a mixed up soup of physical, transport layer, and protocol layer. The original press release said a Gigabit Ethernet line was used for simulation. Does that mean they put RJ45 connectors on a truck-sized spool? That wouldn't be Ethernet anymore at that length. I'm pretty sure naked TCP/IP doesn't beam itself through space either.

I imagine that getting TCP/IP through space is far easier encoding than ordinary household WiFi.

[hammarbtyp]

Hurrah!

hurrah - at last an actual use for Blue Ray

Pity the data could not be extracted due to DRM

[Tom 7]

Shit does this mean I will have to pay Sony

to see the sky in the highest definition possible?

[l8gravely]

Somehow I just think that we're going to get interplanetary or even just in-orbital DDOS attacks sooner rather than later.

[Timbo]

I suspect that most alien technology is so well in advance of TCP that said aliens would have to degrade their systems to be able to commit a DDOS attack.

And why on Earth would they want to do that? (ahhhh...slight flaw - they are (mostly) not "on Earth")

[Alan Brown]

No need for water or minerals or energy

Therefore the only viable reason is to harvest us for their fast food restaurants

[John Brown (no body)]

Looking at ythe graphic...

...did they borrow White Knight from Virgin Galactic?

[TeeCee]

Re: Looking at ythe graphic...

Maybe that's their way of saying that they think this has already been done in secret, so they're running the Red Queen's Race.

[Peter D]

Still no Netflix

The bottom line here is I still won't be able to get Netflix on my secret base on the dark side of the moon.

[Richard 12]

Re: Still no Netflix

Sure you can. Netflix will ship you edge servers, you just have to find some rack space to keep them in.

While postage costs are fairly high, it's worth it to keep the minions happy.

[Binraider]

The 466Mbps claim could use a reference for comparison. The ISS has had a 600Mbps connection for a few years.

Commercial internet over starlink has download speeds of order 100Mbps; and are aiming for 300. (That means inter-satellite comms and sheer numbers of customers must be significantly more capable).

https://www.universetoday.com/143221/upgraded-iss-now-has-a-600-megabit-per-second-internet-connection/#:~:text=With%20its%20new%20connection%2C%20the,Orbital%20Platform%2DGateway%20(aka.

So, what makes Sony's offering any different? Physical size, low cost, low latency, etc?!