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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Has latency and congestion in satellites been resolved? Last time I used one the latency was 1200ms end to end. Gaming was impossible. SSH, even using mosh, was painful. Most interactive websites were not usable. For watching low res videos it was ok. If this has changed, that would be great. I am tired of comcast's duopoly.

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Steerable phased-array base station antennas make Elon’s LEO network possible. Latency is all about the speed of light. Existng networks use geosynchronous orbit, because existung base stations have fixed aim. Elon’s LEO satellites will be as low as 300km versus the 35,000km to geosynchronous orbit.

Latency may actually be better than fiber for long haul access, because routing will take place between satellites. The speed of light in vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in a fiber (which of course we use terrestrially)

https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/elon-musk-quietly-plans-to...

EDIT: More details here on p2p, encryption, etc

http://www.alphr.com/space/1008632/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Starlink...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/807fns/elon_mus...

I would love to see how they handle the multiplexing and routing of so many high speed links by many people, while only using the power that a satellite can maintain.

I am very much looking forward to this. This would solve several problems for me.

Yes it has been solved, thats the advantage of LEO - it's currently at 25ms

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space...

Nice!! I hope this happens soon. I had not even heard of the project.

My goodness, that is exciting. I can't believe I haven't heard that yet. That is (to use my most hated business speak) a true paradigm shift.

As others have pointed out, LEO satellites solve the latency problem. Why then was this not done before? Because LEO satellites move. You can't use a fixed antenna for LEO; you have to track the satellite. This means you have to use a motorized antenna (cumbersome and expensive and generally impractical) or use a phased array antenna with no moving parts. Only recently has the technology for phased array antennas become cheap enough for average consumers. So the delay in fixing the problem was mostly the fault of antenna technology rather than satellite technology.

Postscript: Iridium is LEO and doesn't require a fancy antenna. How come? Iridium is designed for voice; throughput is a few kbits/second. That's way too slow for modern internet. For mbit/sec speeds, you need a higher signal-to-noise ratio and an omni antenna like Iridium's won't cut it. You have to track the satellite.

The Starlink satellites are in a very low orbit that decays relatively quickly, and so is only feasible with a large constellation of very cheap nodes that wasn't possible before. The high latencies are to geostationary communications satellites, which are vastly farther away. Starlink latency should only be 25 - 50 ms.

Low orbit latency is reasonable. Current satellite ISPs use geostationary orbits which are much further away.

SpaceX plan to use orbits at around 1110 km - 1325 km.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit

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