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Comment by edgyquant

1 year ago

The area between a starlink receiver on the ground and a satellite isn’t a vacuum

That's a great point, I was curious so I looked it up. Google offered the following:

"The speed of light in air is about 299,705 kilometers per second, or 2.99705 × 10^8 meters per second. This is almost as fast as light travels in a vacuum, slowing down by only three ten-thousandths of the speed of light."

So seems like the speed of light in atmosphere is still a lot faster than fiber.

The speed of light in air is 99.97% of that in a vacuum, vs about 2/3 of c through fiber.