1371 sats \ 5 replies \ @Athena_Alpha 19 Oct 2023 \ on: Starlink - the end of the free internet? Or a new birth? tech
Excellent write up but sorry, this is ludicrously wrong. Fibre is no where near being at its "limit". Starlink is fast, no arguments there, but it doesn't hold a candle to fibre and we're still increasing bandwidth capacity every year.
For example, a team in Japan achieved a 319 Tbps speed over a 3,000 km distance. This used 552 channels over a 4 core piece of fibre. This was 2 years ago.
On Oct 10th 2023 Nokia Bell Labs achieved 800 Gbps over a SINGLE channel (optical wavelength) that spanned almost 8,000 km!
Each fibre can have 100+ wavelengths crammed in it (eg 552 / 4 = 138). Thus you could theoretically combine the two to get 138 x 800 Gbps = 110 Tbps per fibre. Fibre optical cables can have HUNDREDS of fibres in them.
Historically, undersea cables have been designed with anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred fiber strands. However, newer undersea cables, especially those deployed in recent years, often contain several hundred to several thousand fiber strands.
So let's call it a "reasonable" cable with 144 cores (this is very common for everyday telco cables around cities too) and you get 110 Tbps x 144 = 15,897 Tbps per cable. These 144 fibre cables are about an inch thick, if that.
So that's 15.897 Pbps. In a one inch wide cable.
And yes, these are "in the lab" numbers and so real world products are obviously slower, but run of the mill telcos world wide already have access to:
- 144+ fibre optic core cables
- 400+ Gbps+ SFPs
- Super-Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (SDWDM) systems that support hundreds to thousands of wavelength per fibre core
So that's minimum in the real world currently: 144 x 400 Gbps x 100 = 5.76 Pbps
drops mic
</rant>
Besides this point though, excellent write up :)
Thanks for the clarification and evidence. Those are some insane numbers
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Glad to see someone smack the shit out of OP.
@k00b, once again, fuck your tiny buttons that are space too closely together
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Can you be more specific please?
Which button B did you hit when you meant to hit button A?
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Accidentally hitting Zap instead of Reply when it's positioned like this:
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Ah! Very helpful. Thank you!
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