[shaklee3]

While that's true for a first approximation, weather, gateway outages (very common as you increase the number of them), total satellite capacity (making sure you aren't overloading a single link), and just non-working paths are commonplace. Just making sure that you aren't overloading a particular satellite is an extremely difficult problem. That would be really neat if you could work that into your simulation, where it would bypass certain satellites if there's just no more bandwidth available.