[hyperionplays]

Preface: Day job is owning a low latency telco.

a single cable system under construction(which we are buying part of) (there are over 30) has over 120t of capacity @400G waves, but we are already discussing doing 800G waves, which will double that. We currently operate on over 7 submarine cables, one of the landing stations we operate out of has over 10 cable landing which is over 850T of capacity across all cables.

Most of my metro DF backhaul can push 16-19T down a single pair, and most of my builds are 1728 core fiber.

Starlink is very cool, it will connect ALOT of under served or simply not served people across the world, but the notion that it will even have the slightest chance at dinting the Subsea cable market is laughable.

[mlyle]

Most of us are not talking about Starlink. I'm talking about this optical uplink technology, which can push tens of terabits per second through the atmosphere between each uplink and satellite pair.

No, a single uplink can't replace a subsea cable.

[foobiekr]

Any free space optical approach you can imagine will be slower and noisier than the equivalent technology in a fiber. You are not going to get DWDM channel density in free space or throughput.

This is not real.

[mlyle]

> Any free space optical approach you can imagine will be slower and noisier than the equivalent technology in a fiber.

Granted. More path loss, dispersion, potential for interference. The question is how well can you do?

> This is not real.

I believe ETHZ; of course there's more to do to make a practical system.