So, my parents livr in an area where the only internet available is satellite. It sucks.
However, they also have satellite TV and can watch that no problem.
What’s the difference? Is it just a scale issue where TV has more money and resources compared to satellite internet companies?
In: Technology
Because TV is not interactive, and satellite communications have some amount of built-in latency because of how far from earth the satellites have to be.
Latency is the time it takes for a signal to travel from you to whatever server and back again, and because communication satellites are generally in geostationary orbit so you can point your dish at the satellite and it doesn’t move. That means they have to be really far from the earth (because the closer you are the faster you travel relative to the surface of the earth) – about 35,000km – and because radio waves can’t travel faster than light it takes a certain amount of time for a signal to go from you to the satellite to the server and back.
According to [this](https://www.satsig.net/latency.htm) website the minimum latency for a single round-trip (say, to request the data from the server) is about 240 milliseconds if you’re on the equator, but then it’s another 240ms minimum before you get the data you asked for. This is also just the absolute minimum time it takes for the radio waves to get there and back again, so it’s not accounting for things like signal processing time at the satellite and on the server, any data that needs to be resent because of weather, etc, so it could end up being hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds (I tried playing WoW over Hughesnet in a storm once and my ping consistently read north of 8000ms, or 8 full seconds.)
TV signals are easier in this regard because it’s just a continuous one-way transmission, so even if it takes several seconds to get to you you don’t notice, then it’s just a question of bandwidth (the amount of data that can be sent in a given period of time.) However, there is hope for the future of satellite internet from programs like Starlink. What Starlink does differently is instead of putting one big expensive satellite in geostationary orbit they’re putting tons of small cheap ones in low earth orbit (550km instead of 35,000km) and bouncing the signal between them to get it from you to its destination and back. The round-trip transit time to Starlink satellites and back is on the order of 5ms (not counting for bouncing the signal between satellites, etc) rather than 240ms. Even if all told it winds up being 50ms that’s still a pretty reasonably low amount of latency, good enough for most online gaming even.
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