SpaceX: Understanding Starlink

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What else is required?

To make it understandable, let's use an example. Suppose you want to watch a video on YouTube. That IP address request would be sent to your router, which connects to Starlink's router box in your house. This, in turn, connects to what people refer to as a dish. It's not actually a parabolic dish, but a set of phase array antennae, likely located on your roof or outside. These antennae communicate with the satellite, which then finds a gateway. The gateway connects to the traditional fiber optic cable internet. For simplicity, I'm skipping some steps involving telecom equipment like switches. The fiber is routed to a data center, specifically a rack of ours at the data center, which is likely the location of the video you're looking for. This entire route is called backhaul. It's from the user to the telecom service to find the information. The front haul is the return route after retrieving the video. Now we send it back through the fiber, back to the antenna, back up to the back to the gateway, back up to the satellite, back down to the dish on your house, back to the router and back to your phone.

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I'm asking this because Amazon claims that one of its main advantages over SpaceX is its access to AWS's cloud infrastructure on land. So, I'd like to understand if this is true. Why is this relevant for satellites, and how does SpaceX address this issue?

However, SpaceX is starting to rely more heavily on a revolutionary technology - laser links between our satellites. This technology allows communication from satellite to satellite, reducing the need for the signal to travel long distances on the ground. Instead of going up to a satellite from your house, down to a gateway antenna, and tracing 1,000 km on the ground to a data center, you can go up to a satellite and then trace those approximately 1,000 km in the sky from satellite to satellite down to a closer gateway antenna near a data center. This new technology is hoped to be more reliable and faster than our fiber system as it travels through the vacuum of space, not through glass.

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Correct. My question pertains to the laser piece where you suggested it should be faster than fiber. Could the entire Internet be powered by satellites one day, or will it remain as it's advertised today, for less densely populated areas and certain use cases not in densely populated areas such as aviation, maritime, or military? I'm trying to understand that.

Could we hypothetically support all the world's internet traffic with satellites if we had reliable laser networks that beamed directly onto data centers on the ground? Assuming not all internet content is stored on satellites, which seems reasonable, you'd need to retrieve some things from the ground. However, you could hypothetically have a system where the only fiber would be in data centers. Once you transition from sound of the antennas to light, you'd need some fiber. But for the most part, you could go from antenna at your house to satellite, then via lasers to a data center, and back up and around with virtually no ground fiber. Could this system support all the internet traffic in the world? Hypothetically, yes.

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