>Even at a greatly reduced orbit, I can't believe that bouncing up and down via satellite as part of your link could be any part of a time-arbitrage recipe in 2020 and beyond ...
Really? Just some rough napkin math here, but only photonic bandgap fiber reaches near light speed (~99.7%) and I'm not aware of any large real world deployments of that or even near future ones. Regular fiber is only around 70% c. Transmissions through air (and obviously near vacuum as it exits the main atmosphere) are very nearly c. So from a latency perspective Starlink should in principle have up to a 42% inherent raw transmission speed advantage right? So that then has to go against the extra RTT to get up to a satellite and back. It looks like the lowest V-band shell is planned to be at just 210 miles, with another shell at 340 mi, and a final Ku/Ka-band shell at 710 mi. I don't know if the lowest shells are supposed to have any point to point mesh capability or must go to a higher shell first, but if they can that's only about a 420 mi inherent RTT penalty. For a link over 1400 miles, that seems like it might give them an advantage. Of course, there will be other routing factors, but then again on the fiber side only a few links (NYC to London for example) are actually really point to point optimized, most routes around greatly separated parts of the world have their own extra distance penalties due to transmissions having to take the legs of triangles rather then the hypotenuse.
I'm not an HFT person, but I assume there is probably arbitrage to be done between, say, NYC/London and Tokyo or other Asian exchanges and the like too. A lot of those are 6000 to 7000 mi, something like NYC to Sydney (ASX) approaches 10,000 mi. At those kinds of distances even if the signal has to go all the way up to the outer shell to mesh it looks to me like it could still beat a conventional fiber transmission right? I don't know if HFT firms will be that core as customers or how important they are in the scheme of things here, but a rough check certain seems to indicate there should be potential there in terms of the physics and what infrastructure is current deployed.
Really? Just some rough napkin math here, but only photonic bandgap fiber reaches near light speed (~99.7%) and I'm not aware of any large real world deployments of that or even near future ones. Regular fiber is only around 70% c. Transmissions through air (and obviously near vacuum as it exits the main atmosphere) are very nearly c. So from a latency perspective Starlink should in principle have up to a 42% inherent raw transmission speed advantage right? So that then has to go against the extra RTT to get up to a satellite and back. It looks like the lowest V-band shell is planned to be at just 210 miles, with another shell at 340 mi, and a final Ku/Ka-band shell at 710 mi. I don't know if the lowest shells are supposed to have any point to point mesh capability or must go to a higher shell first, but if they can that's only about a 420 mi inherent RTT penalty. For a link over 1400 miles, that seems like it might give them an advantage. Of course, there will be other routing factors, but then again on the fiber side only a few links (NYC to London for example) are actually really point to point optimized, most routes around greatly separated parts of the world have their own extra distance penalties due to transmissions having to take the legs of triangles rather then the hypotenuse.
I'm not an HFT person, but I assume there is probably arbitrage to be done between, say, NYC/London and Tokyo or other Asian exchanges and the like too. A lot of those are 6000 to 7000 mi, something like NYC to Sydney (ASX) approaches 10,000 mi. At those kinds of distances even if the signal has to go all the way up to the outer shell to mesh it looks to me like it could still beat a conventional fiber transmission right? I don't know if HFT firms will be that core as customers or how important they are in the scheme of things here, but a rough check certain seems to indicate there should be potential there in terms of the physics and what infrastructure is current deployed.