Comment by mbreese

All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)

1) you send a signal to the satellite

2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station

3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP

The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.

Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.

With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.

Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:

Customer - satellite - ground station - internet

The signal can go from:

customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.

This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.