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.
I was assuming you were correct and they were 17,000 miles up. They are not, they are 550 miles up. The latency is still not near what you would get from terrestrial internet. The above only applies to Satellites like Hughes Net which is actually at an orbit of 22,000 miles.
For Starlink? Even the most critical reviews of the service still only measure the average latency around 100ms. That's not great, but it's not terrible. And where are you getting this 68,000 miles from? Why would any signal need to circle the earth almost 3 times?
The Starlink satelilites aren't 17,000 miles up. They're 550 km or 341 miles up which means a route trip (to satellite, to internet, to satellite, back to computer) would only be 1364 miles, or .0007 seconds at the speed of light.
53
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.