Hacker News Reader

Comment by jez | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine wanting to use satellite internet as my daily driver. A quick search says that the physical limit for latency is around 500ms? That's unplayable for most video games, and would make things like SSH'ing to a server pretty annoying.

But I imagine you'd probably go there to get away from things, and just rely on internet when absolutely needed.

View on HN

Starlink will be a LEO (low earth orbit) satellite network. Satellites travel at much lower altitudes resulting in much lower latencies (I think easily below 50ms was what I read before).

Ah wow, I didn't realize that Starlink is a service specifically planning to address latency! Thanks.

And, in practice, the latency will actually be better than fibre. So instead of a 240msec ping to the US from NZ, it'd be closer to the theoretical minimum of 25msec, but by how much, who knows? I could see a realistic 50-80msec perhaps.

Which is still pretty mind-blowing.

FWIW I've been using conventional (geo-stationary) satellite for the past 7 weeks. SSH is surprisingly not horrible, though it could obviously be snappier. RTT for servers that are physically ~250 km away is ~600ms. (Obviously you really shouldn't be ssh'ing into your servers anyway - that's what configuration management tools are for.)

No one wants to use satellite as their daily driver, but almost by definition some of the best places on the planet are necessarily a long way from a) people, and b) modern infrastructure. Everything is a tradeoff.

Most video games are perfectly playable -- but I suspect you meant most multiplayer video games, and yes, that latency's not going to work for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com