Pardon my lack of knowledge about this.
In: 11
I used to build products to support satellite communications. A geosynchronous satellite is ~1/8 of a second away at the speed of light. That’s REALLY far away!!!
So if you want to connect to something, your signal first goes to the satellite (.125s), then back down to earth (.250s), then out to the actual internet and back (.325s), then back up to the satellite (.5s) then back to you (.625s).
That’s two thirds of second for each round trip. While the amount of satay that is returned to you might stream quickly after that, these latencies cause huge delays in communications.
For instance, if you want to open pets.com. You will send the request for the address of pets.com, which you’ll get back in, say, .75 seconds. Now you need to connect, that’s a connection request, an acknowledgement from the server, acknowledgement from you, so another .75 seconds. Now you need to request what you want from them, another .75 seconds. Your best case for a page to start loading is .75×3 or just over two seconds.
Now each image you want to load has another 1-2 second delay on top of that. You won’t be happy…
Starlink eliminates this problem by having thousands of low orbit satellites, so the time to reach them is much faster.
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