SpaceX Is Launching 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Tonight
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> It's tomorrow at 11:11,5 GLOMQRSFFFFTIP'YËGOH`rockSWAMSWAM time.
Surely you can't expect everyone to learn these, right?
Incredible stuff.
That's debatable. Most humanitarian application maybe.
In short they are planning to use a low orbit (high drag/low lifetime) to launch Ku- and Ka-band sats.
I couldn't find anything on what the consumer side of this would look like, especially since the low orbits means you can't just point a dish at a sat... at least without some fancy tracking.
The most important implication of the low altitude is low latency. As low as (or potentially lower than) in-ground fiber. It will be the first good satellite internet.
Starlink will be bouncing your packets to earth relays. For all we know, those relays could be directly attached to AWS datacenters. "15-25ms" could be the entire end-to-end latency, not just the "last mile" latency.
Even with your pessimistic estimations that the "15-25ms" is just the last-mile of an equivalently long haul across the internet, we're not talking about some unmanageable increase in latency like geostationary satellite internet has.