Black out coming; Elon Musk says Starlink active in all continents even Antarctica
(www.ndtv.com)
❄️ INCLUDING ANTARCTICA ❄️
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I like Starlink, but I take issue with this statement..
This is what we in the trade call 'bollocks'. Information travels at the speed of light in a vacuum, the same as it does in a fibre optic cable.
Where it benefits is from a reduced number of devices between the endpoints which take a couple of milliseconds each to process and route the traffic - that doesn't actually mean the traffic travels faster, there's just fewer devices to slow it down as it moves across the network.
This is false.
There is a physics formula for calculating the speed of light in different mediums:
Speed of light in the medium = Speed of light in a vacuum/Refractive index of the mediumThe refractive index of silica glass (what most fiber optics are made of) is 1.5, and the speed of light in a vacuum is 3x10^8 m/s, therefore
Speed of light in silica = 3x10^8/1.5 = 2x10^8So you can see that information in fiber optic cables will travel at 2x10^8 m/s vs. 3x10^8 m/s in a vacuum, or about 33% slower.
This also does not take into account the fact that there is also a net slow-down effect because the light is bouncing off the sides of the cable as it travels.