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MIT, Nanovation to Partner on Photonic Research
Tirisfal writes "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nanovation Technologies Inc. today announced plans to establish a world-class center dedicated to the research and prototyping of photonic technologies, a 21st-century field that will make communications hundreds of times faster. Check out the press release here."
I don't believe orbital satellite latency is due to the speed of light. Light travels at ~186,282 miles per second. That means you get 1ms of latency for every 186.282 miles. Orbital satellites are not high enough to have substantial latency due to distance.
While it's true that satellites tend to have slower processors, latency due to the speed of light is very real. Think about your own calculation - for a satellite in Low Earth Orbit, about 300 km up (about 186 miles), you have a 2 ms latency round-trip. And that assumes that the satellite is directly overhead.
In practice, the situation tends to be much worse than this. Viewing at an angle can easily add a factor of two or three here, but that's for LEO; many satellites are instead in geosynchronous orbit, at about 40,000 km. At this altitude, they have an orbital period of 24 hours, which means that you don't have to keep adjusting your satellite dish to track them. However, it also means that you'll be getting about 130 ms delay _each_way_ to the satellite. Round-trip from one point on earth to another, and you start to see why you get latency.
Even fiber over the surface of the earth will give you latency. Per thousand km, you get about 3.3 ms latency each way (ping of 6.7 ms). The farthest point from you is about 20,000 km away. That's almost (but not quite) as bad as geosynchronus orbit.
Quantum computers will make processor a helluva lot more than 10-50 times as fast as electrical ones. You'll be able to do near-infinate calculations simultaneously. There will be no more Moore's law, no more bottlenecks, and certainly no more cryptography as we know it. Theoretically, a quantum particle can exist in an infinite number of states simultaneously as long as the effects of those states aren't being directly observed. Therefor, your quantum logic gates can do as many instructions as you want at the same time.