So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you’re in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
and what’s in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only “the last mile” is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat “potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance”
I can imagine some use cases for faster ping between two low orbit satellites could be important but my imagination begins and ends at rocket guidance. I don’t see that ever being useful for 99.9% of networking. The signal has to go down to earth receiver at some point and atmosphere and dish overhead will always lose to a cable.
It’s a boring answer - but cable will remain undefeated until some magic breakthrough in physics comes along. It’s simply just that good.
So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you’re in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
and what’s in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only “the last mile” is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat “potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance”
Ping
I can imagine some use cases for faster ping between two low orbit satellites could be important but my imagination begins and ends at rocket guidance. I don’t see that ever being useful for 99.9% of networking. The signal has to go down to earth receiver at some point and atmosphere and dish overhead will always lose to a cable.
It’s a boring answer - but cable will remain undefeated until some magic breakthrough in physics comes along. It’s simply just that good.