The Need for Speed

+ Moving Vans in Space

Working title for this article was 'I'm fast as f**k boy!' It’s a silly bit that went viral, spawning a bajillion videos of dogs with zoomies. Look it up for the pure joy of going fast. Today we talk about just how fast the internet has gotten and how it will soon be inescapable - oh and rocket moving vans! 🚀💫 🛰️

Fast is best, no denying. Best Incredible - Dash. Best DC superhero - Flash. Best Marvel superhero - Quicksilver. OK that last one is definitely false but Flash just got his own movie, so. Regardless, I stand by Dash. I did ask the internets who would win a race between Flash and Quicksilver and found considerable analysis. Apparently, Flash is fast as f**k boy and Quicksilver is just, well, pretty fast.¹

Without Flash-like speed we’d have no Internet. Without the constant and dramatic progression of internet speeds the OG ARPANET wouldn't have grown past a collection of chunky boxes in university basements. If it’s fast, users will come, and they will stay for dessert. No speed, no need.

Bodynote²:

When I built products for a living, we had guiding principles that trumped any feature. Stuff like security. Arguably the most important of these was speed. No feature is worth another 1/2 second to load or scroll or refresh.

Although I build websites for a living now - speed still trumps everything. Check your site - I'll allow a few seconds for the very first page load but after that everything should be sub-second. See also Friction is the enemy!

Godzilla versus the Avatex 1200hc

In college I busted my piggy bank to buy this beige beauty, Godzilla for scale:

The Avatex 1200hc plugs into a telephone landline³ and it can send data back and forth at 1200 bits-per-second. This one connected via a fat cable to either my Mac or a dumb terminal to dial into Berkeley's computer lab so I could pull all nighters from the comfort of my apartment. Work from home!

Fast forward a few years; now I have fiber internet 🤩 Couldn’t believe our house was on the side of town that had fiber - gigspeed! Don’t need a stinkin AI⁴ to figure out that a gig-per-sec makes my life 833,333.33 times better than my 1200 baud modem did⚡⚡⚡

The best part of all this is I don't fret about bandwidth anymore - I never - ok rarely - check speedtest. Everything just works - including streaming movies on TV … over wi-fi. The quest for adequate internet speed is very nearly won and soon we'll worry about something else slowing our tech down. The speedy work of a generation of engineers has become part of the foundation for what's next.

Where’s the plug at?

Fast networks are only good if you can get to them. At home these little eero wi-fi pucks make sure my house has no dead spots. I live in a city so when I go outside my phone has good data speeds. Airport, Train, Ferry, Coffee Shop - all have the wee-fee now. But there are still plenty of dead spots. I can ride my bike out of town and find them without breaking a sweat. Try living in a van down by the river or on a farm or up on top of a mountain or on a boat in the ocean.

The oceans posed a solid challenge to trans-continental connectivity back-in-the day. Now we have enough wires under the ocean connecting the Earth’s continents to run not one, but two round trip cable runs to the moon and back! Nearly a million miles of cable.

Brian Klaas

wrote an excellent story about the shenanigans that went along with that and how we got it done:

The Hidden World of Undersea Cables

Connecting continents still doesn't solve the problem of internet access in rural areas. Enter Starlink. Satellite internet always suffered not only from slow speeds but also from delay or latency because, well you’re bouncing your data off a satellite in space that’s like 10,000 miles away and moving wicked fast - like Flash 10,000 miles per hour fast. All this introduces delay and anytime latency approaches a significant fraction of a second - forget about real-time conversations or streaming.

Latency with Starlink is 20-40ms which is amazing and while it’s not as good as my Fiber connection (<10ms) it’s easily taken care of on the software side and similar to what you’ll get with a lot of terrestrial internet connections. Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit (LEO) so only 300-ish miles away and they use lasers yep space lasers for fast handoff to the next satellite as they whiz by. Oh and there are like over 5,000 of them in a mesh across the sky now growing all the time - another batch was launched earlier this week. If you want to learn more of this magic, much is written. This video breaks down not only the satellite tech but the equally magical pizza sized dish shaped earth antennae. Possibly the only thing you need to know about that is its nickname - Dishy McFlatface. 📡

As part of last week’s SpaceX all hands, Musk talked up the next generation of Starlink satellites and how they’re much better but also bigger - too big to launch on the current Falcon rocket fleet. So, SpaceX is building a garage door into the cargo bay of their big new StarShip rocket to get the new generation of Starlink satellites up into space and launch them into orbit.

The Giant Pez Dispenser

Yep, just like a gigantic pez dispenser:

The pic is a little blurry because it’s a video still - here’s 40 seconds of rendered pez dispensary.

This was my first DOH! moment watching the SpaceX All Hands - the space race is no longer about getting people up into space but bringing all our stuff with us and new Starlink satellites are just the beginning.

Remember the Space Shuttle? It had a big cargo bay that opened up like a clamshell and satellites would pop out. Starships cargo capacity is MUCH bigger (about 6X). Here's one of the visuals from the all-hands showing SpaceX’s progression to carry stuff:

They plan on 150 launches this year, up from around 100 in 2023:

If you want to build a base on the moon - you need to bring like power tools and cement mixers. If you want to build a colony on Mars - you need to bring like bulldozers and jackhammers. Welcome to the era of moving our stuff into space!

I wish you weren't so F**in awkward bub

Closing eff-bomb and my second takeaway from the SpaceX all-hands - Musk is super awkward.

Musk did an especially awkward dance around two things:

1. Telcos - don't come at Starlink - we’re not competing with you even though we can do cell service now pinky promise 🤙

2. NASA - thank you thank you thank you for the big contracts and no I don't do drugs 💊

May all your adventures be speedy!

Best, Andrew

1. One more from the cutting room floor - hero most likely to kill your girlfriend in an opening scene - The Boys A-Train.

2. I don’t know if that’s a word but in my head it’s a footnote that was important enough to graduate up to the body as an aside.

3. I often get asked about the origin of the name Wirepine. Landline is half of it. When I bought the domain I had a job replacing corporate phone systems with computers (and software). That meant you no longer needed a separate wiring system for your phones, known as landlines. Telecommunications companies refer to this legacy side of their business as wireline services. The other half came out of spending a lot of good times in the Sierras surrounded by pine trees. Scrunch your eyes tight and you get Wirepine.

4. I did need a calculator though, because David wasn’t around.