Fiber also has far better performance that satellite can never match.
Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.
Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
cole@lemdro.id 16 hours ago
there’s no fundamental physics limitation that makes this true
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
This makes no sense on the face of it. Let’s say the satellites are 100 km (or miles) above the earth. If I was to connect to a server 10 km (or miles) away, my complete route over fiber is 10 km. My complete route over satellite is just over 200 km (assuming it’s between those two points). Now, let’s say the server is 500 km (we’ll assume the earth is flat over this expanse, even though that’s about 5° around the earth). So our fiber link has to go 500 km, more or less. Our satellite link has to go about 540 km, best case scenario. If we raise those satellites, it only gets worse (it’s probably closer to 860, best case scenario, for satellites at 350 km).
I just did a quick check, and the curvature of the earth over that 500 km scenario is about 20 km (it won’t be 20 miles for 500 miles).
Now, you might start to argue that were talking about straight lines, and that’s true for satellites but not for fiber. And that might be true. But we’ve already shown that the hop to space and back is already increasing that distance by 60% or more. But those two or so straight lines are just til you get to the Starlink hub, so you aren’t going to reduce this much more than the numbers above. And yes, fiber will have some extra distance due to following the grid rather than straight lines. But, again, that only matters to the ISP hub and then you’re back to the same distances.
The other argument you listed is the speed of light in space/atmosphere vs. fiber, and it’s a valid point. Not there are some interesting things done with guiding light to the center of the fiber, which is another way of saying there are multiple refractive indexes, but let’s go with a refractive index of 1.5. That means the speed of light in glass is 2/3×_c_, or that light in space can go about 50% farther. And that’s about the added distance for using LEO satellites.
tldr: All the benefits of transmitting through air or space are basically negated by the added distance, where the best-case scenario is only slightly better than the worst-case scenario for fiber.
cynar@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.
The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.
Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
Satellites need to orbit at some distance above the planet though, so the round trip will always be fairly long even for ones with a pretty close orbit.
MangoCats@feddit.it 20 hours ago
Seriously, this is in the “well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime.”
Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.
Lectral@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
The side effects include filling orbit with space junk, crashing satellites to Earth, and blinding our ability to see meteors with a collision course for Earth. The side effects may not be predictable, but they’re definitely measurable.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 19 hours ago
Starlink has been much better than every other option where I am, but I will switch to fiber as soon as it gets here.
They’ve been promising fiber here for over a decade, but I can finally see them installing it two miles up the road now. Hopefully it will actually be available sometime soon.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 17 hours ago
What’s wrong with 4g? I live in a rural region and have been using it for years
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
For me? 40/5 was about the best I could get. Mountains between me and the towers.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Unreliable, high latency, slow bandwidth and data caps?
REDACTED@infosec.pub 13 hours ago
None of the issues you mentioned are 4G issues in itself. I have none of said issues. Even gaming is great, getting around 20-30ping on local country servers.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
I’m not defending satellites, I’m saying fiber is much superior at all the things I mentioned above.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 22 hours ago
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should’ve been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I’m super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
MangoCats@feddit.it 20 hours ago
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.
But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Except that US ISPs have already been provided upwards of $80b to roll out a fiber optic backbone for rural connections, and have instead largely pocketed the funds and sat on their hands.
It has largely fallen to smaller communities to incorporate their own local ISPs and manage their own roll-outs, as such projects aren’t viewed as worthwhile for private companies.
Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.
Even if a Federal program (not under this administration, obviously) was to just run fibre parallel to the existing interstate highways, and leave the last (20) miles to local utilities - it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable than LEO - and without all the additional negatives that come with that!
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
We can definitely afford it, especially with LUDs plus federal subsidies. That’s literally what they’re for.
RangerAndTheCat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I’m sure we could afford it from muskrat’s government contracts ( our tax money )
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I don’t disagree, it should be deployed to rural areas. It’s never going to happen though, it’s just not profitable.
Sure, electrical infrastructure was deployed to the whole country, but it doesn’t need to be replaced and upgraded as frequently as Internet infrastructure does. Even if some rural areas do get fiber at some point, don’t expect the infrastructure to be upgraded regularly enough to stay comparable to denser areas.
You’re never going to find a company willing to do that job. We could do it at the national level, but I have my doubts that the country is headed in that direction.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
That’s what the subsidies are for. Plus, fiber does not necessarily need to be upgraded after installation (especially rural, where there’s less customers in general). It’s not copper or coax, it doesn’t have the same limits, and can usually handle terabit speeds.
But yes, without the local, state, and/or federal governments supporting it, people in rural areas won’t have a choice.
Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Hello neighbor!