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The section on satellite internet should probably be updated to clarify that LEO satellite networks like Starlink orbit at 1/100 the distance of GEO satellites,
by dreamcompiler 4y ago
The section on satellite internet should probably be updated to clarify that LEO satellite networks like Starlink orbit at 1/100 the distance of GEO satellites, so the parts of the latency calculation involving uplink and downlink become much less important. (The rest of the numbers in the latency calculation still apply.)
- erinaceousjones 4y agoIt is nice that they thought of "oil rig bros" though. I can't imagine the publically funded research ships I've worked on will even legally/politically be allowed to use Starlink even when within good coverage areas of it, at least not for a long time due to institutional pressures, and there's a risk that people see Starlink as "the" new shiny satellite provider and assume that's the worst-case latency/bandwidth target! Like - our 2mbps internet connection shared between ~50 people does _actually work_, the Internet is _fine_, but so much of the WWW is frustratingly broken - not just because of large page sizes (we have caching proxies onboard, large downloads are fine), but predominantly because of so much parallel loading, servers being impatient with connect/read timeouts, DNS servers treating us like a DDoS attack, a lack of progressive enhancement (page blank = hanging waiting on a font to load from jsdelivr...). Seeing people still focusing on the nitty gritty like optimising for page loads given TCP slow-start is nice to see from a "LITERALLY accessible all over the world" standpoint :-)
- dreamcompiler 4y agoWhy would Starlink be a more difficult sell politically than one of the GEO providers?