this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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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.
The main part of ping is the processing at the hops taking time, not the physical distance (for reference, with full speed of light you could get around the equator in around 150ms). I do recall there at least being a claim that starlink has reasonably good ping, it doesn't seem impossible for it to be better than via fiber, even if shooters are probably still unplayable
Nah dude, every time I've checked my routing the rtt is basically speed of light. Like it's 200 ms give or take to LA. As the Crow flies that's 24000 km, which would be 80 ms RTT. idk the exact route but we can probably add say 30% in the distance cause those cables aren't dead straight and there's a bit of waggle around the actual network infrastructure.
like yeah maybe half is the processing but that fraction only gets smaller with distance and LA is like the closest English speaking hub.
edit: just ran a test now https://www.meter.net/ping-test/202404-92320-2f35.html that's theoretically 90 ms so yeah, even if that distance is accurate it's 60% light speed limits.
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.