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
Tl;dr, if you’re not on starlink the satellite is really far away, really old, really slow, and the signal is really weak.
Outside of starlink, most internet satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, which means they are around 35,000km above the earths surface. To beam a signal from your parents house, to the satellite, then back to a ground relay station means it needs to travel 70,000km. If we ignore all the processing needed, that’s 250ms of lag right out of the gate.
Now on top of that, the satellite isn’t going to be that computationally powerful. It can only use as much power as it can get from the solar panels, and it’s going to have to use a radiation hardened CPU(, and its power budget is shared with the processor that flys the satellite and the receive/transmit antennas. On top of that it’s not like you can just go replace it with the latest and greatest tech every year, satellites are expensive and it likely needs to be in orbit for 10+ years to be economical.
And to make matters worse, radiation hardened CPUs are slow, like painfully slow. Think mid-90’s palm pilot slow. A first gen iPhone would run rings around them. This painfully slow CPU has to route data from thousands of endpoints back down to the ground relay, which then has to connect it all the internet. And because the satellite is 35,000km up, the signal isn’t that powerful, so it can only send so much data at a time.
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