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Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: for a transatlantic network, would it ever make sense to do something along the lines of buoy + helium balloons + laser or microwave? Or in a similar vain, would it make sense to attach microwave 'towers' to shipping vessels?

I could see something like that work really well for the HFT world, where some clever hacks could make use of an unstable, but extremely low latency connections.

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It depends what problem you're trying to solve.

For inter-landmass traffic, my gut feel is bandwidth is the bigger concern.

The latencies we see now (as noted in TFA) are not that far from theoretical limits. I'd suggest responsiveness is best solved further up the stack -- and it's what most organisations have done / are doing.

Basically you don't want to run chatty protocols over high RTT networks, and people are slowing getting this ... but many orgs are stuck with HTTP, MAPI/MoH, SMB/CIFS consuming most of their WAN bandwidth.

the current longest microwave links are only a few hundred kilometers apart if I recall correctly (http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/exalt-sets-new-worl...)

so you'd be talking about MANY links to achieve a transatlantic connection. Optical links would have to be even closer.

I doubt that would be lower latency. Even forgetting the physics and curvature issues, you'll end up with many more hops which is going slow it down due to processing and retransmission delays.

Microwave is faster even though it requires more hops.

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