All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit?
Through orbit is very bad for low latency. Lowest latency is through undersea optical fiber with modern technology, and that gives around 100ms round-trip for New York-Tokyo (according to Wolfram Alpha), at best. So probably around 150ms in real life conditions, with routing and not taking exactly the most straight path. Which isn’t that great.
As a geek, my first though is : ssh ! ;) Starting at 100ms and above, the ssh experience starts to feel laggy, you don’t have instantanous-feeling reaction when you move the cursor around, which is not pleasant.
More realistically : everything that is “real-time” : phone/voip/video conferencing, real-time gaming like RTS or FPS, maybe even remote-controlled surgery (not my field of expertise, so not sure for that).
My experience with games across the Pacific is that the timezone coordination is much more an issue than latency, but then again I don’t play twitch games. So, I take your point, but I really do not see neutrinos solving the problem. If I were an engineer with a gun held to my head I would rather think in terms of digging a tunnel through the crust and passing ordinary photons through it!
Through orbit is very bad for low latency. Lowest latency is through undersea optical fiber with modern technology, and that gives around 100ms round-trip for New York-Tokyo (according to Wolfram Alpha), at best. So probably around 150ms in real life conditions, with routing and not taking exactly the most straight path. Which isn’t that great.
As a geek, my first though is : ssh ! ;) Starting at 100ms and above, the ssh experience starts to feel laggy, you don’t have instantanous-feeling reaction when you move the cursor around, which is not pleasant.
More realistically : everything that is “real-time” : phone/voip/video conferencing, real-time gaming like RTS or FPS, maybe even remote-controlled surgery (not my field of expertise, so not sure for that).
My experience with games across the Pacific is that the timezone coordination is much more an issue than latency, but then again I don’t play twitch games. So, I take your point, but I really do not see neutrinos solving the problem. If I were an engineer with a gun held to my head I would rather think in terms of digging a tunnel through the crust and passing ordinary photons through it!