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by tigershark 2389 days ago
No, the round trip for electromagnetic waves at 350km it’s about 2 ms not 40. The lowest orbit of the satellites though would be 550km and not 350km, but it would still be less than 4ms. From where did you get the 40ms figure that it’s wrong by an order of magnitude?
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I don't know where they got that figure from, but it is unrealistic to not also expect a decent amount of latency to be introduced by the transmission hardware, particularly under load. I have no idea how much, but this has generally been the case with most systems of this sort.
Electromagnetic waves travel at essentially the speed of light. The speed of light is roughly 300km per millisecond. So if they are 550km up, that’s roughly 4ms round trip. Even with horrible inefficiency, it won’t likely increase that by 10x.