Comment by joha4270
5 days ago
I don't actually think latency would be that much worse.
Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour
> speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum
That made me wonder: Why can't we use vacuum cables?
(the sort of questions I should probably be bothering an LLM with.. someone should make a LMGPTTFY)
If you figure out how to make cheap vacuum cables you will probably become very rich.
But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)
> Why can't we use vacuum cables?
Hollow-core fiber is basically this!
> LMGPTTFY
"let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"?
> "let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"?
yes
Not vacuum but an inert gas: https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/fiber/Hollow-core-fiber.html
You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency.
Light travels 2000 km in 7 ms. Maybe you took the inverse and got 150 Hz?