… or a small adventure with the laws of physics and the vagaries of press releases.
I have been paying a lot more attention to the world of things that fly around the Earth since we have been working with the great team of folks over at GeoEye these past few years.
Before I go any further, I want to throw out my high-fives and share in the elation over the successful launch of GeoEye-1 this past Saturday.
This is a great event for all around, and I think is a harbinger of a whole new class of imagery-enabled, imagery-consuming services.
I’m working on a couple of posts that will explore the confluence of these sort of uber-pipes of fresh, interesting data with our sort of arbitrarily scalable, reliable cloud-based apps. So many possibilities … but, as happens so often in my life I first went off on a slight detour …
Something Odd
While thinking about these posts this little item caught my eye:
Ok, this all looks pretty cool – a new crack at using satellites to make it easier to get the ‘net out to remote parts of the world.
Their distribution model even looks pretty smart (wholesaling to ISPs), and their bandwidth admirable (claimed 10Gbs – cool!).
But then I got down to this statement:
O3b Networks uses parabolic antennas, which reduce latency.
Huh?!?
There’s nothin’ the antenna shape can do to change the fact that at the speed of light it still takes about 246 msec (about 1/4 of a second) to traverse the 23,000 miles UP and then the 23,000 miles DOWN to / from the satellite.
But It Goes to 11?
So I thought maybe this was just something lost in the translation to press release. So I went to their site, and found this statement:
O3b Networks’ system virtually eliminates the delay of standard GEO satellites by reducing the round-trip transmission time from over ½ second to just 1/10 of a second. The reduced round-trip delay creates a web experience closer to terrestrial systems such as DSL or Optical Fiber.
Ok, I had to admire their persistence. So, either they had actually figured out how to jump past the speed of light, or maybe the satellites were a lot closer to the ground.
Bingo!
From a story in NetworkWorld today
… O3b will be able to offer the same capacity for $500 or less by using different, cheaper medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellites.
Geosatellites orbit the earth at an altitude of 22,500 miles, while MEO satellites are around 5,000 miles. The latency, or the time it takes for a signal to make a loop between earth and the satellite, can be upwards of 600 milliseconds for a geosatellite because it is further out. For a MEO, latency is around 120 milliseconds, close to that of a fiber network
Darn, that actually makes sense … well, back to work on figuring out how to go faster than the speed of light …
Actually, I meant to say back to work on uber-scalable, cloud-based apps that deliver on the promise of cool new stuff like GeoEye-1!
Comments on this entry are closed.