Discussion

World-first gigabit-per-second laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite

xnx: Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.

1e1a: That's ~162.5 MB in transit at any time

zppln: Weird.

htgb: Shouldn't it be 1000/16 = 62.5?

cm2187: But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.

Meneth: "low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.

amelius: I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.