The high latency questions are only from people who really don't understand the industry. The question most analysts in the industry ask are about how they plan to be profitable.
I disagree. I think people equate bandwidth with speed, because that's what all of the commercials and marketing materials say. Latency is hardly ever mentioned.
Yes people have been burned by HughesNet and garbage like that. But it won’t take much to educate them, people can understand the difference. A simple graph showing the ping times and people will get it.
I suppose this argument works really well on HN. how many people do you think know or care about a ping time? if they did, don't you think we would see all of the commercials for broadband bragging about their latency instead of bandwidth? Streaming media dominates the internet today, and that's unaffected by high latency.
ATSC 3.0 is a possible avenue for offloading some streaming traffic. It seems that the consumer hostile packages we've come to love are taking shape and 2020 may see some adoption...
They probably won't... Links between satellites will use a different routing scheme. Traditional network protocols will "disappear" at the sending ground station, only to "reappear" on the receiving one.
A video link of a simulation was posted on a different comment that shows the "routing" between multiple satellites.
Why wouldn’t they use something like BGP to route between the satellites? Because the topology is explicitly known ahead of time and so the routing can be more “hard coded?”
An interesting side effect of this network is that latency experienced by any two users, anywhere on the network, should be close to equal.
It depends. If you're connecting to a data center across the street, the latency will probably be worse. If you're connecting to one on the other side of the world (or somewhere where the packets have to take a more circuitous route), the latency might be better. The satellites aren't that high up so latency won't be a huge issue.
I think bandwidth limitations will be more problematic. The Earth is really big, and there's not really a good way with LEO orbits to focus your satellites over urban vs rural areas. IOW you can focus coverage on lower latitudes but not really certain longitudes.
IIRC previous FCC filings said each satellite would have ~20 Gbps of bandwidth. That'll be great if you're in a rural area, and I think the gigabit speeds some people are hoping for are actually possible in certain situations. However a lot of people think that they're going to be able to replace the Wifi router in their apartment with a Starlink antenna... I don't think that will be practical any time soon. I'm not an RF person but I doubt there's enough spectrum for each satellite to have tens of thousands of users simultaneously.
edit: also, like with 5G the signal quality is going to be crappier when it is rainy or cloudy.
It's going to be a similar situation to cell phones. When you purchase the product, you know that it will be slow some times outside of your control, but that's the trade off for being able to get connectivity almost anywhere. With no hassle as long as you can see the sky. On your boat? Sure! On your farm 30 miles from anything? Sure!
It will be interesting to see if they geo-lock the base stations or will allow you to move them and then re-calibrate/re-register your location for load balancing.
