I guess I wasn’t in on this secret, even though NewScientist (10 November 2018) claims everyone knows it:
IT IS no secret that Elon Musk wants to build a space internet. His company, SpaceX, has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set up a vast network of thousands of low Earth orbit communication satellites. But the company has been tight-lipped about the project, known as Starlink.
Now Mark Handley at University College London has created a detailed simulation of what Starlink might look like, which he will present at a conference next week.
Although Musk has said he wants more than half of all internet traffic to go through Starlink – Handley’s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to high-frequency traders at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.
But there’s a couple of things wrong here.
First of all, the Internet was designed, and is successful, not because it has a centralized design, but because it has a decentralized design. Routes can change dynamically as computers go offline and come online, as network link availability fluctuates. Routing half of Internet traffic to go through a single entity, even dispersed, is an invitation to sudden hiccup and even downtime if that entity suddenly disappears – and I suspect Musk would run that as a monoculture, meaning that any problems that a particular node of that entity possesses will be a problem for all those nodes.
Secondly, as long time readers know, high frequency traders get little sympathy from me. Their economic activity does not appear to improve society in general that I can find, and in fact probably amplifies the movements of the stock market to a degree unwarranted. That can be damaging to investors, experienced or not.
But Musk will do what Musk will do, and we’ll all be blown about in the aftermath. Hell, I’m scheduled to test drive one of this Tesla 3 models tomorrow. I do not expect to buy one, but perhaps the salesman will be extra-persuasive.
