3 ms·

> cross-satellite link is out, so we're basically back to Iridium (read: DSL) How are those two related? Cross-link will somewhat improve latency, but will ha

• londons_explore 6y ago
  It will have a substantial impact on bandwidth, because bandwidth to ground stations is much less than bandwidth to users.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    That seems backwards. They should have much more ground station bandwidth to those giant tracking dishes than to little personal phased array antennas. The problem with no sat-to-sat traffic is they'll need a crapton of downlink stations, which increases cost substantially. Also, they'll be geographically limited--no service out in the middle of the ocean.
    • gpm 6y ago
      > Also, they'll be geographically limited--no service out in the middle of the ocean. There's a workaround for this, which is to stick a relay station out in the middle of the ocean on a ship that bounces the signal to a satellite closer to land. Expensive, but workable for the right price. If there's a high enough density of commercial ships, you might be able to piggyback on the user terminals for this purpose. At the same time the military is likely one of the most interested customers and probably wouldn't be thrilled at relying on the typical distribution of commercial ships.