RE: 30th April consensus2 May 2021 00:28
"Because of its network's location in low-Earth orbit, Starlink satellite internet also promises average speeds of up to 1Gbps"
"Latency is how long it takes for your internet signal to make a round trip from your device to the server and back, measured in milliseconds (ms). Fiber's latency speed is around 17ms—slightly faster than that of cable internet, which is usually around 20-30ms. Starlink, however, is expected to launch with a latency below 20 milliseconds (ms)"
I keep reading the hype posted about Starlink, but it doesn't make sense in the real world.
Lets deal with the bandwidth first, imagine multiple customers all sharing the uplink/downlink bandwidth, how many 1GB/S speeds will the system accommodate? Not many imo. The higher the bandwidth the higher the frequencies required to accommodate them, but the higher you move up through the SHF/EHF Bands, the more you're affected by atmospheric conditions like rain fade, inversion layers, etc, etc, so data will be lost and require retransmission.
The satellites will be orbiting at approximately 500KM above the Earth, so the uplink delay is approximately 2ms, it may have to route through other satellites to reach the nearest ground station, say 3ms, and another 2ms on the downlink, total 7ms before the data starts hitting the core backbone networks. The numbers I've just used are probably wildly optimistic, as the satellites will need to be passing close enough, and having to deal with data from multiple customers.
I'm sure a lot of clever people have worked all this out, but the more complicated a system, the more likely it will see major issues. Personally, I like the idea of High Altitude Platforms, maybe in conjunction with local ground stations for rural 5G coverage, but they'd also suffer atmospheric RF problems during bad weather. In reality Fibre will always beat any RF solutions on bandwidth, reliability, and speed.
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