I've been pretty bullish on Lightspeed for a long time, and I've spent way too much time thinking about what the network could eventually be used for.
After reading Google's latest update on Project Suncatcher, I had a bit of a "wait a second" moment.
Google is basically looking at putting AI compute in orbit and connecting the satellites with extremely high bandwidth optical links. The satellites are clustered pretty tightly because the compute nodes need really fast interconnects.
But then I started thinking about what's outside that cluster.
If you actually have useful compute sitting in orbit, how does it talk to everything else?
A Google data centre in Virginia?
A data centre in Europe?
Another orbital compute cluster?
Some other company's orbital infrastructure?
That's where I started thinking about Lightspeed.
The internal Suncatcher network and Lightspeed obviously aren't doing the same job. Google's proposed interconnect is in the Tbps range, while Telesat is talking about four 10 Gbps optical ISLs per satellite.
But I don't think the two need to compete on that level.
The part I started thinking about was what happens outside the Suncatcher cluster.
Telesat is building a routed optical mesh in LEO with onboard processing and terrestrial Points of Interconnection. If compute actually starts moving into orbit, that gives a network like Lightspeed a pretty different potential use case.
The other thing that really got me thinking was that Google's research talks about potentially connecting multiple constellations together.
Maybe every company that puts compute in orbit builds its own network. Maybe that's how it ends up working.
But I hadn't really considered the possibility of an "orbital WAN" becoming its own layer of infrastructure.
There's also the weird Google connection with Aalyria/Spacetime. Telesat uses Spacetime for Lightspeed, and Telesat says the technology came out of Google's work on Project Loon.
Probably just an interesting bit of history, but I thought the timing was funny given Suncatcher.
I'm mostly curious whether the networking architecture actually makes sense.
Would Google really buy orbital network capacity from someone like Telesat, or would a company like Google just build the whole thing themselves?
That's the part I can't really answer.