[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[John Gilmore]

Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law, this
> does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more
> powerful rockets to a terrestrial pig.

This a funny statement, but it's obsolete, since the speed of light
varies based on the medium, and Moore's Law *has* improved the speed of
delivery of packets.  Sending packets to orbit and back (through air and
vacuum) is much faster than sending them through a (glass) fiber optic
cable covering a similar distance.

I suggest that Moore's Law is what distinguishes the NASA rockets of the
1960's era from SpaceX's reusable rockets of the 2020's.  Now they have
complex processors throughout, and can manage hairy maneuvers
themselves, most importantly a soft landing back on Earth.  This vastly
reduces the cost of launching the Starlink satellites into orbit to
catch and relay those packets, making the whole project economically
feasible.  (Compare with the rapidly bankrupt Iridium effort, which used
conventional rockets.)

And if you haven't seen how a Starlink base station works -- it's a
triumph of Moore's Law.  The Starlink dish is a ~1,200-element phased
array achieving ~33-34 dBi antenna gain, comparable to a 60 cm satellite
TV dish but with electronic beam steering that can track satellites and
execute handoffs in microseconds. SpaceX achieved consumer pricing
through aggressive silicon integration (reducing beamformer chips from
~80 to ~6 between Gen 1 and Gen 3), hybrid PCB materials (mixing
expensive RF laminates with cheap FR-4), and software-defined
calibration. Manufacturing cost is estimated at ~$400.  See this
analysis:

  https://abgoyal.com/posts/starlink-dish-rf-deep-dive/

	John

PS: However, you didn't explain what the speed of light has to do with
why it's too hard to fix multihoming... nor IPv4.