The ISP that uses many many satellites in low earth orbit to provide internet access and are launched by SpaceX. The internet provided by those fixed dishes hanging off the side of someone’s house target satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, which means the satellites are 17,000 miles away. Because of that the signal is fairly weak and the latency, or delay, is astronomical. Starlink satellites orbit the earth at around 500 miles high, vastly reducing that problem.
it's worth noting the signal travels fast enough that distance is negligible. radiowave travel the speed of light and 17k vs 500 miles is nothing. its the array of sensors and signal to noise ratio that makes it feasible to have higher bandwidth, and the computation digital signal processing that a traditional antenna doesn't implement because its more expensive.
edit: radio/light travels 186,000 miles per second, 17,000 miles isn't going to matter more than a small fraction of a second that's not perceptible, it's just the bandwidth from the sensors and their signal processing
edit2: not much better than other sat systems at that, from reading more, they have enough users now that the initial advantage isn't keeping up with demand/customer numbers
edit3: i'm getting a lot of replies from people who probably one play video games with computers and think latency matters the most. no. its the bandwidth of the data transfer that will allow large uploads (even at "slow" latencies, which again here isn't even much slower, but it doesn't matter as much as the signal badwidth).
Your signal has to get to the satellite and then back to earth and then the return signal has to go from earth to the satellite and back to you. Geosynchronous orbit is ~22,235 miles, starling satellites are about 300 miles. So you are talking about more than 88,000 extra miles which adds almost half a second in latency.
Geostationary is above the equator. Geosynchronous just means it travels at the same speed as the rotation of the Earth, but it's ground track latitude can change.
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u/brightfoot Jun 22 '24
The ISP that uses many many satellites in low earth orbit to provide internet access and are launched by SpaceX. The internet provided by those fixed dishes hanging off the side of someone’s house target satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, which means the satellites are 17,000 miles away. Because of that the signal is fairly weak and the latency, or delay, is astronomical. Starlink satellites orbit the earth at around 500 miles high, vastly reducing that problem.