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I think the processing time might be heavily driven by the waveform and how they do the networking. As complexity increases and they move towards a software defined networking schema, the latency goes up. If they're not using ready-made/proven ASICs, the latency goes up. I don't believe any of this is public from them.

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I think so too. In addition, they seem to have regenerative payloads on-board (otherwise I don't get how they get ~20Gbps/sat with a single Ka-band antenna), so they need to do full decoding + encoding on the satellite. Not sure how fast that can be done, but it will add some latency ms probably.

This is the first I've heard someone speculate about that. I didn't think they were doing 20G with a single antenna, but that they were adding all spectrum together that it's capable of processing (even if it doesn't get access to it all). On-board processing would also require a significant amount of power, and it's riskier.

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