Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.
Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.
Correctamundo. You can’t speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don’t sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.
If we must have a satellite it should be a single geostationary one.
Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.
Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.
Correctamundo. You can’t speed up light. For low latency you need LEO, and since they don’t sit still for you (8km/s roughly) you need a bunch of them in some kind of formation or constellation, so that you generally have something to connect to at any given moment, or at least a chain that can relay to ground stations.
Kessler syndrome has entered the chat
We could be architechting our own Great Filter (assuming we’ve not passed it already, and assuming we can’t solve the Kessler syndrome).
Some light reading for those unfamiliar:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter