I’ve read posts / other articles about how Elon is planning to allow for low latency / gaming on StarLink. I understand how they will increase bandwidth – but isn’t latency limited by speed of light?
In: Engineering
Historically communications satellites have orbited in a high, geosynchronous orbit. This has the advantage that the satellites appear to stay in the same location in the sky at all times, so a fixed dish antenna can be used. The disadvantage is that they’re also far away, 100 ms up in the sky.
Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit which is much closer, less than 2 ms away when they’re directly overhead. Now ping times involve a signal going up to and back from a satellite on the way to a server and then up and back again on the way back, but this can still total around 10 ms for Starlink.
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