They deorbit every 5 years and burn up in the atmosphere they don't make it to land (although i think i remember a a part of a very early version did and changes were made because it did, but that might have been something else)

There have been a couple launches where some solar radiation caused damage or a problem with the stage 2 and they all came down and burned up before they made their planned orbit. On occasion, there may be a faulty satellite that doesn't reach its proper orbit after launch and instead comes down instead.

Short of an error during launches, it's all planned.

Its not, light is the fastest AND isnt as interuptuble and lag induced as satalite. A wired connection will ALWAYS have lesslatency to a sat link.

The problem with fiber is it isn't direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.

It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.

Line of site is a thing......

I miss dial up. Like local providers with 2 or 3 numbers to try.

light in a vacuum is fastest

light in glass is slower than that

actually think about this before you reply

I wish there was more municipal fiber. It's absolutely insane that the big ISPs fight it and often win.

That's...not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum --- light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they're just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don't call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don't use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that "physics bandwidth" tends to care about fractional bandwidth ("delta frequency divided by frequency"), whereas "information bandwidth" cares about absolute bandwidth ("delta frequency"), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz --- so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum

I'm a complete laymen when it comes to this, but this sounds like it would pertain to latency rather than bandwidth. I expect that fiber would have a much higher data capacity than satellite.

Better get to work laying cable.

Yep, you're right --- I was just responding to parent's comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light

This has got a scary amount of up votes, especially considering that this is the 'technology' community.

Radiowaves are also 'light' and infact as many others have mentioned so eloquently, light travelling through air is faster than light travelling through glass. The reasons why fiber is better are - better stability because of lower packet loss and interference, better efficiency because of lower attenuation and losses due to diffusion, reflection, and other processes when traveling in a fiber optic cable, and more bandwidth because we can use more favourable frequencies in optic cables (@qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website explains it perfectly in another reply to the parent comment)

Starlink is designed to demise on re-entry. It's a core criteria.

Starlink demises on re-entry.

Pros of fibre:

• cheaper: much cheaper than copper or satellites.
• faster: latency is faster than copper and wireless (to satellite).
• very high bandwidth: theoretically unlimited. In practice a commercial fibre optic multicore run for domestic use at street/town level will be pushing ~800Gb/a, and this number generally doubles every few years as tech advances. The new spec being finalised is 1.6Pb/s.
• high stability: does not give a crap if it's cloudy, foggy, or rainy, or if the trees have wet leaves, or if it's just a very humid day, unlike all forms of outdoor wireless comms. Does not care about lightning strikes, as copper does.
• long life: 25 to 30 years life quoted for most industrial in-ground fibre, but real life span is expected to be much longer based on health checks on deployed cable in countries with large fibre rollouts. Upgradable without replacing the medium throughout that lifecycle.
• lowest power usage: fibre optic uses far less power and energy than 4G 5G and satellite infrastructure.

Cons of nationwide fibre:

• billionaires who launched thousands of satellites make less money.
• monopoly Internet Service Providers won't be able to fleece their cable internet customers some of the highest charges for net access in the world.
• people will tell you "uhm acktually wireless internet is the speed of light also as it communicates via photons", but will usually leave out all of the interference it experiences.

There's nothing better than fibre optic infrastructure for general public Internet connectivity. Wireless/satellite should only be a last resort for remote users.

Shouldn't the 5G covid brain control serum chip nanobot people be upset about this?

What does that mean to you exactly? All the ones that burnt up early weren’t designed for that lmao

Microwave point-to-point radios are fastest because they travel through air, but more importantly, are typically the shortest path possible by line-of-sight.

Being 66.7% of speed of light doesn't matter terribly when you consider that the cable path is shorter by more than 66.7% of path taken by satelite link.

In capitalist America, laws decide you!