I was looking for the kind of internet speeds that are possible via satellites. GEO satellites tend to have very high latency and LEO constellations like Iridium and Globalstar have lower latencies but their throughput is lesser than ground-based broadband internet. What are the technical reasons that make broadband internet user-speeds difficult to achieve via satellites?
In: Technology
Power, noise, and bandwidth. A communications satellite has multiple transponders, each with maybe 36MHz bandwidth. The transponders are radio receivers and transmitters. They use a lot of power. For an economic successful system, you’ll need to have thousands of satellites in LEO, and millions of users. Starlink is trying to build such a system, but you aren’t going to see fiber-like speed. For weak signals, noise is a big problem.
> [The Shannon-Hartley theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem).
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