2 ms·

If I can have a conversation while going 200+ km/h in a car/train, why not with satellite link?

• JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  You can do this on a train, as there is a mobile network tower every 10 miles/15 km. With satellites, this means that before one satellite has crossed your sky and disappeared over the horizon (the reason for the 4mn) another should have appeared and taken over (handover). In low Earth orbit, a satellite travels 300 km in one minute. I guess that's unlikely because it means about 50,000 satellites will be moving into low orbit for this network alone. The surface of the Earth is approximately 510 million square kilometers. If your satellites do not cover all Earth surface (as Starlink), then it's another story, you need much less satellites, so the probability of always having a satellite above you improves. As of September 2022, Starlink consisted of more than 3,000 small, mass-produced satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). It covers only 5 orbital planes with hundreds of satellites in each group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...