The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies.
The FCC said the decision impacting Elon Musk’s space company was based on Starlink’s failure to meet basic program requirements and that Starlink could not demonstrate it could deliver promised service after SpaceX had challeged the 2022 decision.
It’s physics. The old satellite Internet used geosynchronous satellites. That orbit requires the satellites be 22,300 miles away.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So pretty much it takes almost a quarter of a second (250ms) just for the signal to travel up to the satellite and down to the ground station.
250ms added to the normal Internet travel time each way makes for a very delayed internet connection (in practice, 650ms average latency or 2/3rds of a second ). Voice chat has notable pauses, gaming becomes practically unplayable, and so on.
It’s a bit hard to visualize sub 1s times, but if you say “how are you” at a normallish speed, the words “how are” would take close to 2/3rds of a second.
Starlink satellites are only 340 miles up. A round trip is less than 4ms. So the packet and the response from the Internet reach you sooner. Also each satellite can handle a fair amount of bandwidth which if the number of users is kept in check means closer to modern bandwidth. Looks like Starlink latency runs about 25ms on land and 100ms in remote areas (far away from a ground station).
Also HughesNet seems to offers a max of 50mps while Starlink’s current top (business) service is 500mbps.
So they’re both satellite Internet services, but because in the difference in how they are deployed they offer very different speeds and latencies.
Starlinks latency with no nearby ground stations will probably get better as more laser links go up as well allowing for more direct routes.
Although the better solution is more ground stations.
Excellent explanation