3 ms·

These are going to be LEO satellites (no higher than a few hundred km), instead of GEO satellites, which would make the lower bound of the latency pretty low (c

These are going to be LEO satellites (no higher than a few hundred km), instead of GEO satellites, which would make the lower bound of the latency pretty low (comparable to cable or DSL).

jarcoal 12y ago
This helped me visualize how close LEO satellites are, as well as how far away others are (e.g. GPS). http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalaltitudes.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - berberous 12y ago
    You're misreading the chart, take another look. The moon is 10x further.
  - skyebook 12y ago
    Not quite, according to that graphic the moon is nearly 10x further away than the GEO distance
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- amitparikh 12y ago
  Cool! Quick back-of-the-napkin indicates that the RTT for LEO satellites (at the upper bound) would be only ~4.7% of the RTT for GEO satellites. I'm sure there's much more to the story that I'm missing, but an LEO satellite should have a latency of around 11.75ms. In 2012, average US latency to Google was ~50-60ms [1]. Would bandwidth be the limiting factor? [1] https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/ https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-perfor...