this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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What about starlink? Can you get that in Australia an how is the ping?
In case you seriously wonder: the problem is not cables being slow, but rather Australia being super damn far away from the places servers are normally located in, which means that on top of all the delay the equipment brings in, it just takes time to propagate a signal there. It's one of those edge cases when the literal speed of light is not enough, and it's a hard physical limitation.
You can't circumvent it with Starlink, as you still have to move the signal between, in this case, Asia and Australia, plus up and down to the height of Starlink satellites, plus delays of the ground station, at least two satellites (actually more), another ground station, and all the switches and routers on your way there.
Hmm. Wasn't starlink supposed to propagate directly from satellite to satellite around the world? Or is that still not the case? The speed of light is only reached in vacuum (it's slower in fiberglass, like 66%) and afaik one of the selling points was that they could do high-frequency trading faster between the stock exchanges of london and new york. And the reason why they use low earth orbit. So I assumed this should significantly reduce ping.
Fair criticisms!
I didn't closely follow Starlink-related news recently, but regardless, on such a high distance and such a low height I expect the very curvature of the Earth being a problem with direct transmission of signals from one satellite to the other. May be wrong again, though, didn't calculate.
Also fair on speed of light. However, even if we don't count travelling up, down, and extra equipment, and take 33% improvement at face value, this turns 80-150ms ping into 53-100ms, which is still clearly not good enough for competitive gaming.
Yeah I haven't followed either why I'm curious if any of the claimed benefits materialized.