A society grows great when old men plant fiber whose speed they know they shall never download from.
Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole…
What to do, what to do?
Just think how much control he can have if he owns the medium which people access the internet.
And he’d only do good things with that power /s
Of course. In a month or two he can tell trump Dem statez are stupid and he should force them to do that.
While trump looks down and says “don’t take it out of your mouth again”
That will work out as well as the death tunnel (formerly hyperlink)
Honestly, I think starlink is a fantastic idea in general, but this is clearly bullshit. Starlink works well in tandem with fiber, not as a replacement.
It’s just never going to be as cost effective as installed fiber. Fiber is obviously the right technology to use in heavily populated areas i.e. for the vast majority of Internet users. And where the population is sparse and laying fiber for individual customers is cost prohibitive, that is where satellite connectivity shines. If SpaceX or anyone else is pretending otherwise, they’re being blatantly deceitful and malicious. That’s not in Internet users’ best interest.
lets get down to the real reason he wants to do this. he would be able to turn off connection for millions if they piss him off, or hand over the data to said political actors like putin or trump, also to manipulate future elections like he did last time.
Fiber fucking rules
Alternative Headline: Billionaire Signals States Should Speed Fiber Rollout
Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.
And upgrading is piss cheap. Just change transceivers.
Same fiber cable that does 1gbps can do 100tbps.
That’s not true… There are different types of fiber with different throughputs depending on the class of the cable and the length of the installation.
It is true.
Multimode (what I think you’re trying to reference) isn’t used in distance applications at all, it’s only for short in-building links. Anything that your ISP would provide you would be single-mode. Carrier/Backbone is virtually 100% SMF as well. SMF (OS1 and OS2) don’t really have a bandwidth cap. It’s all transceivers not the fiber.
But the point is that fiber that ALREADY in the ground, you can upgrade simply by changing the transceivers. It doesn’t matter the length, SMF/MMF, or anything else… you just get a transceiver rated for the length of run (power of the led/laser, and the optics). The length is irrelevant otherwise as the presumption is that the install in the ground has been shown to work in the past already.
Old standard ITU-G.652 single-mode has been made to push multi-petabit transfers in lab environments. The only change was the transceivers. And to be clear, ITU-G.652 was standardized in 1984. Nobody rips out the fiber from the ground (caveat is that the cable itself hasn’t degraded). You just upgrade the optics/transceivers.
“It’s not the fiber that’s limiting—ITU-T G.652 defines physical specs (dispersion, attenuation), not throughput. Field trials over 96.5 km of real-world G.652 fiber showed 56.5 Tb/s using advanced DWDM and modulation
source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01873
Your statement didn’t specify an application!
The context of the discussion does…
SpaceX doesn’t provide in rack or in-building connectivity.
SpaceX is an ISP. You wouldn’t have an ISP running multimode.
ISP’s absolutely run multimode. That’s how you get fiber into a building or between buildings. Different types of fiber all play a role in a network deployment.
Broad statements are misleading. OM4 multimode won’t push 10gb at 500meters no matter how good your hardware is.
Broad statements are misleading.
Ignoring the context of the discussion is even more misleading. In the context of this conversation, ISPs providing consumer connections and obtaining grant money, my statement is 100% accurate.
That’s how you get fiber into a building or between buildings.
You just said multimode can’t do significant speeds at distance, yet claim that buildings separated by distance would be connected with it? That logic doesn’t hold.
Intrabuilding or intrarack Yes, you’ll find multimode fiber occasionally. But even these rare cases are increasingly replaced by single-mode as costs drop and bandwidth needs rise.
Everything else (ISP deployments, backbones, FTTH) Single-mode fiber dominates. I haven’t seen a single ISP deploy multimode for consumer-facing services over a typical network radius (~hundreds of meters to kilometers). The only minor exception is MMF from the building network room to an apartment unit, which is irrelevant for this discussion and would be EXCEEDINGLY rare as most buildings would just copper line to the unit. But even in that case… the 20+km from the head end to the building counts for much more than the 20meters to the unit itself.
For all practical ISP purposes, single-mode fiber is what’s in the ground/on the pole, and upgrades are handled via transceivers, not ripping out the cable.
OM4 multimode won’t push 10gb at 500meters no matter how good your hardware is.
But just because you said it…
https://www.corning.com/catalog/coc/documents/application-engineering-notes/AEN075.pdf
and OM4 is suitable for distances up to 550 m
https://www.fs.com/uk/blog/om4-multimode-fiber-faq-highspeed-connectivity-guide-9499.html
OM4: Supports 10 Gbps up to 550 meters.
https://www.timbercon.com/resources/calculators/om1-om2-om3-and-om4-fiber/
OM4 Not specified 500 m* 150 m 150 m
*The IEEE has yet to officially give a distance for 10GBASE-S on OM4 fiber. The distances are decided by the IEEE in 802.3, not The TIA or ISO/IEC cabling standards. Some glass vendors say 500 m, but most are now quoting “up to 550m.”You absolutely can run OM4 at 10gbps at or over 500m depending on your optics/laser.
But Multimode was never the point of discussion as the whole thread is based around broadband services (virtually none of it serviced by multimode, if any at all) and grant money for rural area coverage. Any fiber upgrade in this scenario will 100% be SMF with no qualifiers. In my past 30 years of IT career all buried and pole mounted fiber is SMF that I’ve ever seen for an ISP. I can tell you for certainty that ever fiber I’ve buried in the past 10 years for several companies has been SMF. I’m not even sure that I’ve touched MMF in the past 5 years even in intra-rack setups, I think I might have gotten some with a government auction win about 8 years ago I wanna say? With costs of SMF at near parity for the cable itself and getting closer every year in the modules… it’s a dying form factor and was never really in use for ISP services to begin with.
I would burn the money before giving it to the nazi
That’s a dumb ass idea, and I’m literally on Starlink right now
Yeah! I want my internet connection run by a man baby who turns off your access if he doesn’t like you!
I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.
Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should’ve been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I’m super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours
I don’t disagree, it should be deployed to rural areas. It’s never going to happen though, it’s just not profitable.
Sure, electrical infrastructure was deployed to the whole country, but it doesn’t need to be replaced and upgraded as frequently as Internet infrastructure does. Even if some rural areas do get fiber at some point, don’t expect the infrastructure to be upgraded regularly enough to stay comparable to denser areas.
You’re never going to find a company willing to do that job. We could do it at the national level, but I have my doubts that the country is headed in that direction.
That’s what the subsidies are for. Plus, fiber does not necessarily need to be upgraded after installation (especially rural, where there’s less customers in general). It’s not copper or coax, it doesn’t have the same limits, and can usually handle huge amounts of data (the limit primarily being the transceivers at both ends). The costs of upgrading would also likely be lower than the initial install, something that couldn’t be said about providers like Starlink. Fiber is about the most efficient, cost effective (especially in the long term), and future proof way to provide internet. Starlink is overall much more expensive to maintain.
But yes, without the local, state, and/or federal governments supporting it, people in rural areas won’t have a choice.
Hello neighbor!
It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.
But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.
Except that US ISPs have already been provided upwards of $80b to roll out a fiber optic backbone for rural connections, and have instead largely pocketed the funds and sat on their hands.
It has largely fallen to smaller communities to incorporate their own local ISPs and manage their own roll-outs, as such projects aren’t viewed as worthwhile for private companies.
Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.
Even if a Federal program (not under this administration, obviously) was to just run fibre parallel to the existing interstate highways, and leave the last (20) miles to local utilities - it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable than LEO - and without all the additional negatives that come with that!
I’m sure we could afford it from muskrat’s government contracts ( our tax money )
We can definitely afford it, especially with LUDs plus federal subsidies. That’s literally what they’re for.
Fiber also has far better performance that satellite can never match.
there’s no fundamental physics limitation that makes this true. in fact, light in a vacuum travels faster than in glass fiber, so the theoretical latency of LEO internet is actually faster compared to fiber over a certain distance
The side effects include filling orbit with space junk, crashing satellites to Earth, and blinding our ability to see meteors with a collision course for Earth. The side effects may not be predictable, but they’re definitely measurable.
What’s wrong with 4g? I live in a rural region and have been using it for years
For me? 40/5 was about the best I could get. Mountains between me and the towers.
Unreliable, high latency, slow bandwidth and data caps?
Seriously, this is in the “well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime.”
Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.
Starlink has been much better than every other option where I am, but I will switch to fiber as soon as it gets here.
They’ve been promising fiber here for over a decade, but I can finally see them installing it two miles up the road now. Hopefully it will actually be available sometime soon.
all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan… what else could you ask for!
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
ha yeah… not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that
Uh, how often are you using the Internet to connect to a computer in your home town? Maybe 5% of the time?
I’ve never used Starlink, but with a basic understanding of geography and optics, I’m going to bet that in most scenarios the latency difference between Starlink and fiber is negligible.
That said, I’m not suggesting Starlink is a realistic replacement for fiber, just that latency isn’t the big issue. (It has other serious issues)
Much more frequently than you think with CDN endpoints.
Ok, so actual question, How useful are CDN endpoints these days with https everywhere? Because you can’t cache encrypted content. Also you can’t cache live content like video calls or online games. I’d imagine the percentage of cacheable content is actually fairly low these days. But like I said, I don’t actually know the answer to this, i’d be curious to hear your take.
HTTPS can in fact be cached, and most modern browsers will do so unless given a header or something to tell it not to.
Source: Devtools network tab + https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Caching
Browsers partition the cache by “origin” now though, so while it can cache HTTPS content, it can’t effectively cache shared content (It’ll store multiple independent copies).
So Youtube still works fine, but Google Fonts is pointless now.
Edit: Oh yeah, and any form of shared JavaScript/CSS/etc. CDN is now also useless and should be avoided, but that’s always been the case.
Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.
That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.
I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996
Online and not LAN? I have doubts.
That used dedicated servers, right?
So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?
Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.
That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.
In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.
How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?
Is it because latency does not scale in that way?
- Run a
tracerouteliketraceroute cnn com - Kill that by
ctrl-cat the third line. - Ping that third IP address.
Don’t try to ping UK.battle.net or your numbers will be skewed by everything in between.
About 5ms.
Based on the various replies, it sounds like the poster I was originally replying to does not mean pings in any context.
They just mean in this context. Along optimal routes. Right?
Of course they don’t mean in every case. Yeah, if you have to go halfway around the world from two addresses that are very far away from hubs, Starlink might be better. 99.99999% of the time this isn’t happening though and fiber will be better. There are situations for some people where it’s worth it. Fiber is better for the average case though, and it’s where money should be invested.
So then 10x makes 50ms; sounds about right
- Run a
You’re probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).
Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.
My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest
It depends on the instance (people can make them in 4 regions of the world) but 90ms is common for US west and east, for me.
- Cloudflare.com: 5ms
- Google.com: 24ms
That makes sense then. When people talk about their ISP ping, they’re usually talking about how long it takes to get out of the ISP’s network. So that 5ms Cloudflare ping is likely pretty close to what people would consider your internet’s ping.
Speedtest.net is a really common tool for measuring this, since it will automatically check where the closest server is. For your connection, any ping above 5ms you can probably assume is based on your physical distance to the server, or latency on the server’s end. I’m guessing Google doesn’t have a server quite as close to you as Cloudflare
Of course. Still, an exception doesn’t disprove expected averages.
So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?
Because we’re talking about the inherent latency of the connection, obviously.
My average latency on Starlink over the past year is 32 ms. It varies throughout the day from around 20 to 40 ms.
If you are getting 90ms on fiber, you are either pinging a server that’s a long ways away or something is very wrong.
If you look at the rest of the comments, you’ll see I was taking about my ping in a game. Not my shortest path to a nearby server.
A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.
I wish there was a way for the average person to shoot down starlink satellites.
Don’t worry, the way things are going the star link satellites are going to shoot themselves. Unfortunately together with everything else in the low orbit.
Basic physics says satellites using Ku-band or whatever they use can’t compete with fibre.
Satellite internet has its uses like for ships at sea.
Or rural and remote areas. I think it would be a ton of fun to go backpacking with a foldable solar panel and an antenna.
