I’m just curious what the bottlenecks are and what has been done to improve those. Because I remember when it would take 10 seconds to send an imessage and now I can watch YouTube when my connection is solid. Just impressive and I’m curious about it.
In: Technology
Well the main thing isn’t about the radio link, it’s about the amount of satellites.
Those things used to be insanely expensive to launch, maybe you launch half a dozen of them per rocket and it’s an expensive rocket. To enable global coverage with very limited amount of satellites, you need to launch them very high in the orbit and each satellite needs to cover a huge area. This increases latency and reduces the available radio resources assigned to each user.
With SpaceX’s launch solutions, you can drop hundreds of them into the sky cheaply and easily. With more than enough satellites, each only has to cover a small area, so they can fly in very low orbits, this also helps improving radio performance.
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