[sho]

* facepalm

Too late to edit. Misplaced the decimal point. Should have noticed that if 22k is 120, 800 can't possibly be 40. Duh.

Still, the actual latency is going to be very dependent on the distance to the base station. If it's nearby then shit, yeah, that will be within 20ms of 5G. Point conceded @jsjohnst.

[jsjohnst]

It doesn’t make sense to bounce a signal over North America / Europe / etc all around on the mesh. The best course is to send it to the ground almost immediately (aka <2-3x max) for those areas as otherwise you’re wasting bandwidth. But over the Pacific Ocean it makes complete sense as adding a ground station in the middle of the ocean doesn’t make sense and even if you did, you still have latency to nearest server farm.

So yes, my point still stands for the majority use case.

Also, to be clear, I was making following claims:

1) bandwidth on par with initial 5G deployments (aka up to 1gb/sec offering)

2) Latency on par or better than existing LTE networks.

[sho]

Yeah, my skepticism was definitely misplaced. I guess I didn't internalise just how close that is! Mea culpa.

This could open astounding possibilities if the prices are set within any kind of consumer-affordable level. I'm fairly interested in going on some long sail journeys, for example, but the total lack of connectivity (without a ruinously expensive and hence rare conventional satphone) gives me a lot of pause. What if something happens at work, or worse yet with my family, and i'm literally uncontactable, hundreds of miles offshore somewhere for a week? I know that for some people that's the point, but I wouldn't be able to stop worrying about it.

If your prognosis is correct then not only might it become feasible to be contactable on a boat for a reasonable outlay, you might even have friggin' broadband. For me and I suspect many others that's a very exciting idea.