Sorry, I was referring to the underlying tech and bands. The physics behind LEO doesn’t automatically grant it the ability to be faster than GEO. It’s faster because the sattelites are brand new not 10 years old.

Heh yep, in fact they’re not lasting as long as they were supposed to.

Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.

Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What’s interesting is the layperson (non online gamer) doesn’t notice much. It’s not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can’t handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It’ll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.

The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.

Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.

The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.

But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can’t compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.

This was my first thought too.

Look at the photo of him standing. It’s visible through his pants, it doesn’t look thin.

One big VM dedicated to BOINC project of your choosing.