I do wonder how much of a draw Starlink will be versus terrestrial microwave for things like HFT firms. Guess it will do really well for linking further afield exchances like Hong Kong and NYSE where a straight line microwave route isn't practical so the extra distance added by the orbit doesn't matter as much.
a lot of serious HFT for transcontinental stuff moved to HF radio some years back, with big-ass yagi-uda antennas aimed between locations like the CME datacenter, london, tokyo, new york.
it's very low data rate but also guaranteed lower latency than the submarine cables.
OK so even that will be hard to break into except as a wider bandwidth option which would have some applications the HFT, but it'd be hard since latency is king there.
Maybe with that out of the picture other uses like telepresence for remote surgery can edge in. I've been waiting for a while for that to really take off seems like an awesome way to provide services you couldn't afford to to remote places.
I have read that Starlink, given sat to sat relays, should be able to beat any possible ground based system as long as the distances are great enough. Does that match your understanding of this?
My understanding is it's tough to beat point to point microwave arrays for directness in a lot of cases, they're already pretty close to the straightline path between some locations. The same is basically true for the longer range low bandwidth links that curve around the Earth.
Starlink is at a disadvantage because fundamentally it's pathing across a sphere with a larger radius so even when the path is direct across the Starlink cluster it still has to traverse a longer distance than the equivalent path on the ground. Adding to that the path won't always be directly across the surface of the constellation, depending on where you are and where the destination is you'll find some pockets where the link has to zig zag across the constellation slightly adding to the additional link distance. This [0] isn't necessarily a perfect representation but it does show how starlink's linking may work and how it's not a perfect net. It also doesn't account for the acquisition times for new laser links which were on the order of 20 seconds in another laser sat link test.
I do terrestrial point to point microwave/millimeter wave stuff professionally, so it depends what you're trying to search for. Microwave isn't really used for any significant portion of traffic at "long distances" anymore, like it was in the days before singlemode fiber. But it very useful in places where you want to reach a very rural area or go somewhere that would be cost prohibitive to build to with fiber.
There are atmospheric and practical effects that make going more than 50-60km with PTP microwave, and data rates above 700-800 Mbps, increasingly costly as the distances increase.
It is totally possible technologically to build very long chains of many microwave PTP radio hops, as some high frequency trading companies set up between new york and chicago, but the aggregate throughput and capacity is minuscule compared to fiber.
Would be happy to answer any more specific questions.
Here's an example of a current state of the art point to point microwave radio, for use in the common FCC licensed part 101 bands (6, 11, 18, 23 GHz, etc)
a lot of theory and conjecture about sat-to-sat laser relays has been published by people (and youtube videos made, etc), but many of these theoretical topologies are dependent on plane-to-plane communications which will be difficult to aim and maintain links on.
if you google 'starlink train' and look at some videos, when a batch of 60 starlink satellites is launched ,they're all at the same orbital inclination. they remain at the same inclination but as the weeks go past after their launch, they are spread out to follow each other at several hundred km spacings. but they're still following each other in what is basically a strung out conga line of satellites. communications between forward/rear satellites in the same batch should not be nearly as difficult to aim.
what would be difficult to aim and maintain links on would be cross-plane links between two different sets of satellites, with very high differing relative velocities.
This video goes a bit into the probable topology of the links and gives a good look at how the eventual constellation would look. Eventually in the full constellation there will be 4 easy links to the birds in front, behind, left and right, those 4 will stay in largely the same relative position until they reach the highest latitude of their orbit. Those alone will make an ok link with a bit of a zig zag. The tough ones are those ~180 degrees out of phase those will be crossing roughly perpendicular and at a really high speed.
