SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today. That translates into 42 million gigabytes. Each of the 9,000 lasers in the network is capable of transmitting at 100Gbps, and satellites can form ad-hoc mesh networks to complete long-haul transmissions when there are no ground towers nearby (like when they’re going across oceans).
For comparison, an average trans Atlantic submarine cable is about 0.1 petabit PER SECOND. And there are many cables…
It’s less impressive when you convert back to petabytes. When you do that starlink is “only” about 20 times slower than that single trans-atlantic cable.
Interestingly, it’s possible that starlink routed ping times could be less, as propagation speed on fiber is only around 2/3rds the speed of light. So if the end to end path length is roughly equivalent between the two (and LEO radius is a relatively small addition to the radius of the earth) it could be faster.
Certain companies would pay a lot of money to be a few milliseconds faster than their competitors if they need to react quickly to foreign stock market fluctuations.
Please keep in mind that it is an average cable, that exists today, the new ones are faster. This is also under sea, where the traffic is smaller than on continent. Also, this is just one cable as opposed to the whole network. Overall, the starlink traffic is tiny.