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

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.

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

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?

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)

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

scary amount of up votes

Eh, I think it's fine. Fiber is faster (higher bandwidth, lower latency) than light transmission due to the factors you mentioned, so whether it technically transmits slower than light is largely irrelevant.

scary amount of up votes

Eh, I think it's fine. Fiber is faster (higher bandwidth, lower latency) than light transmission due to the factors you mentioned, so whether it technically transmits slower than light is largely irrelevant.

Again the latency might be not better for fiber. But the difference is small and the other factors are much better so the experience with fiber is a lot more stable .

I do not expect most people to know that non visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum is also similar to visible light. But on technology community on what is a niche enthusiast heavy platform (Lemmy), I expect people to know better to than to upvote something that is blatantly wrong.

The speed of light through a medium is what varies, since I have to deal with this at work, and the speed of light through air is technically faster than the speed of light through fiber. But now there is hollow core fiber that makes this difference less.

Between Chicago and New York the latency of the specialized wireless links commercially available is around about 1/2 of standard fiber taking the most direct route. But bandwidth is also only in gigabits/s vs terabits/s you can put over typical fiber backbone.

But both are faster than humans can perceive anyway.

Yes, but transmission loss causes packet retransmission, which adds to perceived latency, and fiber usually doesn't need to travel as far physically as a satellite, so there's less distance to cover.

So yes, the "speed" of light through fiber is technically slower than via air, the data transfer is usually faster.

Transmission loss/attenuation only informs the power needed on the transmission side for the receiver to be able to receive the signal. The wireless networks I am talking about don't really have packet loss (aside from when the link goes down for reasons like hardware failure).

I mention Chicago to New York specifically because in the financial trading world, we use both wireless network paths and fiber paths between the locations and measured/real latency is a very big deal and measured to the nanoseconds.

So what I mention has nothing to do with human perception as fiber and wireless are both faster than most human's perceptions. We also don't have packet loss on either network path.

High speed/ high frequency Wireless is bound by the curvature of the earth and terrain for repeater locations. Even with all of the repeaters, measured latency for these commercially available wireless links are 1/2 the latency of the most direct commercially available fiber path between Chicago and New York.

Fiber has in-line passive amplifiers, which are a fun thing to read about how they work, so transmission loss/attenuation only applies to where the passive amplifiers are.

You are conflating latency (how long it takes bits to go between locations) with bandwidth (how many bits can be sent per second between locations) in your last line.

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

It means it burns up on re-entry and doesn't litter the earth

What about all the ones he didn’t plan on having burnt up? Or didn’t you know about those

I'd love to hear more about this conspiracy theory, can you elaborate?

I think it's hilarious that you think some Starlink satellites AREN'T designed to burn up. They all will, someday.