3 ms·

I don’t understand though. His cousin is 70 miles away, are the satellite coverages that small?

• jagger27 5y ago
  It’s about the base station capacity, in theory. Though it seems super unlikely that an address that’s only 70 miles away would be on a different base station. This will change dramatically once sat-to-sat laser comms are fully online as it will put more base stations “in range”.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. At 200 Km altitude that the footprint of the satellite wouldn't be all that large depending on the phase array arrangement. It might not be able to swing that far sideways and still get enough signal strength. These antennas don't move physically, the use phase based signal steering (black magic to me).
• giantrobot 5y ago
  The satellites just relay signals from a customer ground station to a Starlink-owned ground station. That ground station has a wired Internet connection. So coverage at your house is dependent on you and a Starlink ground station being in the ground track of some Starlink satellites. Because of their low altitude it's entirely possible for your house being in the ground track of satellites but the nearest Starlink ground station being outside. At some point in the future Starlink satellites will have laser communications between each other. Then only one in that group needs to be able to see a Starlink ground station and the others can route customer signals to it.