• FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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      3 months ago

      fun fact, that would make the transmission slower.

      According to wikipedia cat5 cable has a propagation delay of 5.30 ns/m, which works out to about 62% of the speed of light. While radio waves propagate at the speed of light.

      • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, the reason ethernet is generally faster compared with wifi is mainly due to interference from physical objects between the device and the transmitter. Not as much an issue when you’re issuing commands into the vacuum of space from large, high-powered antennas.

      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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        3 months ago

        Radio waves always propagate at the speed of light, it’s just that the effective speed of light in copper and glass fibre is lower than that in air/vacuum.

        This means that if you have long cables at some distance you’ll get a lower delay by using low earth orbit satellites like Starlink. Assuming a total distance via satellite of 1000km and the effective speed of light in glass fibre to be 2/3 c, cables over 667km will have a higher delay than the satellite.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Some fiber-optic cables are faster than others, because they’re full of air. Hollow-core fibers have a large central cutout and/or a close hexagonal packing of smaller glass tubes. The latter are technically a “photonic crystal.”