Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

So that is &quot;432 Mbit&#x2F;s per laser, and 9000 lasers total&quot;. I don&#x27;t know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than &quot;42 PB&#x2F;day&quot;. Interestingly, they also say each laser &quot;can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link&quot; (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit&#x2F;s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit&#x2F;s is probably achievable in ideal situations (eg. 2 satellites very close to each other), so these laser links are used in bursts and the link stays established only for a few tens of seconds or minutes, until the satellites move away and no longer are within line of sight of each other.<p>And with 2.3M customers, that&#x27;s an average 1.7 Mbit&#x2F;s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB&#x2F;month. (HN readers are probably outliers; I consume about 1 TB&#x2F;month).

My understanding of the state of the art of inter-satellite optical links is that they have only been used between satellites that are basically in the same orbital plane and in more or less the same orbit. That is, the angle from one satellite to the other changes very very slowly, so that the optics don&#x27;t have to do much tracking -- and consequently satellites can only form an optical link with other satellites that are ahead or behind themselves in ~ the same orbit.<p>Cross-plane optical links would have a trickier tracking problem.<p>While there&#x27;s no explicit mention of same-plane vs cross-plane optical links, I assume that the first time people have a public cross-plane optical link, they will make a big deal out of it. :)<p>The article also mentions that SpaceX would need to do further study before using laser links between satellites and ground stations-- this kind of optical link would require both more angular tracking and probably atmospheric correction as well.

I just noticed that they were launching their first satellites in 2019. It&#x27;s impressive that they are now able to casually talk about the different routing options for the data streams to remote areas just 5 years after that.<p>At first this sounded like an utopian dream but now it looks like common infrastructure that has a place in everyones life.<p>This must have been the same feeling when the first landlines were installed. The very first lines were a sensation and then after only a few years it becomes normal quickly.

I have absolutely no idea how that number relates to any comparable operation. Can anyone add a banana for scale?

I sit in my hot tub at night and see 1-2+ satellites go over every single time I&#x27;m out there.<p>Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I&#x27;ve seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.

&gt; The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link<p>&gt; Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke.<p>How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link quality when they&#x27;re shooting around Earth with 17.000 miles an hour?<p>(Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector)

In the long run that could become a massive strategic advantage for the US. A 2nd layer of resilience over undersea cables

&gt; <i>&quot;We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window&quot;</i><p>I can&#x27;t figure out what this sentence means.

The amount of bleeding edge innovation that is rapidly developed and deployed into production in Musks companies is incredible.

So which points are getting “faster than fibre” latency because of this? Extra distance up and down, but make up for it on the long-haul.<p>Won’t beat HF radio though.

Random thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second?<p>I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we&#x27;re talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny?<p>Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.

But how do they beam copies of the space to space links down for wiretapping, as Iridium does?

I hate that PCMag ignores browser preferred language lists. It switches the language on my geo IP address which is a language I cannot read.

The article mentions that they were able to stream video from a starlink satellite as it was de-orbiting - it would be neat to see the video of that, even if it cuts off as the laser link losing connection (or the satellite burns up)

42M GB Per day = 3.9tbps

Just for context, here&#x27;s SDA&#x27;s Open Standard on how they expect to do connections over Optical Links. I assume the starlink terminals work in a similar manner:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sda.mil&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;SDA_OCT_Standard-3.1.0_Signed_Web_Version.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sda.mil&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;SDA_OCT_Stand...</a>

Has anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it&#x27;s a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home, and have had trouble with since day one. I won&#x27;t mention any names (but I will say that it sounds a bit like Smodabone). What is the latency like? The variability of the up&#x2F;down? Does it do what it says on the tin? Is (non-professional) online gaming a go?

My novice view....Laser connections are point to point, so they can be between satellites....But to the end user equipment,having those many point to point laser connections might be too difficult or impractical to achieve...So that&#x27;s where they use radiowaves, which means any satellite over the horizon can talk to a dish...

I’m waiting for two things:<p>1. Full-circumference world round-trip latency sat to sat (yes it has to go to ground to “count” but I just want to know what the number is)<p>2. Deployed LEO servers running with laser communication to the Starlink satellites. Preferably gaming or CDN since either is a great way to verifiably test the limits.

When will we see data centers in space?

This post currently has 420 points, I bet Musk would like that (wont vote to keep it this way)

Is that a lot?

4 nines uptime is great, but I would think the SNR matters more in a packet switched network like this. There are conditions that may lead to a very low SNR.

Somewhat tangential: I assume that Starlink is not yet profitable. How many customers do they need to become profitable?

Is it possible one of these laser satellites miss and hit you in the eye? Would that blind a man?

If I send one byte and it hops through ten satellites, is SpaceX counting that as ten bytes of data?

Are they using Mynaric technology?

3.65 days of downtime isn&#x27;t going to be winning any prizes.

That&#x27;s around 3.9 Tb&#x2F;s, in case you are wondering.

Don’t you mean 42million Gigabytes?

But how much of that data is insane right-wing conspiracy theories? lol

[dupe] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39199368">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39199368</a>

Wait, I thought only Kuiper has laser.

Isn’t the user experience with starlink pretty abysmal for the average user? Both the service and the customer service?

Global internet traffic is estimated to be 3 yottabytes per day. So Starlink is now carrying one of out every 77 million parts of worldwide traffic. Wow, that&#x27;s small.<p>EDIT: there&#x27;s some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.