this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I mean ... that's great for outer space. Not so much down here, except in pretty niche applications.
I mean, you're basically making a data lamp. Hold your phone up to it, get super fast wifi. That's ... niche at best, here on Earth. More refined VR eventually, I suppose?
Could also be useful for internal data transmission inside a chassis where, for whatever reason, a direct physical connection isn't possible.
EDIT: Spelling
Yeah, this could be great for clustered computing. I only did software for a supercomputer company a while back so maybe there's reasons this wouldn't work, but it seems pretty useful within a rack. It'd probably make people over at [email protected] sad to see those cables go away though.
I don't really see the advantage over a fibre connection myself.
No wires for line of site. No digging, no runs, no fragile expensive tips, etc. That is if and when it stabilizes as a medium.
You then have a communication system that can be shut down by fog or heavy rain though.
It's slightly less stupid in interior applications, but data centre applications will almost always be better suited to wired.
Not really since then all computers share the same link and bandwidth, and latency will be very inconsistent with more than two computers since there will be crosstalk and retransmissions.
With cheaper cables, each computers can max out the bandwidth of each cable, and get much lower latency since there's no crosstalk.
The only benefit is that you don't have to run cables, everything else is worse.
They use collimated lasers in space to reduce beam divergence. Distances in space are HUUUGE. A simple bulb or even LED does not cut it.
I could totally see outside-in VR using this. You already have to be in view of a lighthouse, so adding extra equipment to transfer data instead of using a cable would be nice. You'd then need to include a battery in the headset, but all in all it'd probably be better than a cable. Other than that, yeah. I don't see a use for this for many consumer products.