Ask HN: What the fastest internet speed Larry Ellison could buy for his boat?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13734646

by amorphid • 9 years ago

8 4 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Let's make a few assumptions:

- needs to work anywhere in the world a mega yacht can travel

- using today's technology and infrastructure (aka no launching new satellites)

- focusing on raw speed, not latency

- combining multiple signals is not cheating

- price is no object, as Larry is doing this to one up his fictional buddy who has the 2nd fastest possible Internet connection

grizzles• 9 years ago

He could daisy chain a squadron flying air support ships to send his packets back to the nearest fiber hub multiplexed over various mediums, eg. LIFI, 5G, a neutrino emitter, etc.

alex-• 9 years ago

We can, using todays technology, use much of the electromagnetic spectrum [1] for data transmissions. Light, Radio and Microwaves.

I would assume EM regulations differ depending on the waters the boat is currently in. i.e. Internal waters or Territorial waters etc. (different RF regulations for example)

To maximise throughput we would want to consume as much of the spectrum as possible. Think broadcasting in everything; 5G bands, wifi bands, FM, AM, light, microwave links.

As you want to use todays technology; we would need to break the spectrums into chunks which we can use existing solutions on. Different parts of the spectrum will have different properties. e.g transmission distances, bandwidths, etc.

Because of the different types of broadcasts and the volume of data we would probably want a number of relay stations bridging section of the EM spectrum to a fiber optic line. Some of these stations could be very far from the boat, thousands of miles in the case of long wave RF [2].

Compression would likely play an important role also. As we don't care about latency we can take the time to send well compressed data.

I am not sure this is the kind of answer you are looking for, but the kind of wealth Larry Ellison can throw at a problem is obscene.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave#Long_distance_recepti...

Gustomaximus• 9 years ago

Couldn't you spool fiber behind the boat wherever it sails with a direct link into appropriate backbone, re-connecting occasionally dependent on cable length and global region.

So potentially ~1 terabit per second given current potential speeds achieved.

jtchang• 9 years ago

How about a giant container ship full of hard drives sneakernet style? :)

Largest container ship in the world: 19224 TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent containers). Volume is about 39 meters cubed for each one. Volume of a 10TB about 392 cubic centimeters. I can fit about 99490 drives in 1 TEU. This gives me 19,125,957,600 TB of space on this giant container ship. Okay granted it might take a while for his request but it works out to be a pretty good speed.

Ask HN: What the fastest internet speed Larry Ellison could buy for his boat?

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