Comment by ramidarigaz
12 years ago
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).
12 years ago
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).
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/Orbitalal...
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-perfor...