[metadat]

This seems like a surprisingly small amount of data in this day and age of connectedness.

I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?

[initplus]

I don’t have the numbers, but at least for Iridium the data service is basically an afterthought. They allocated so much of their bandwidth to voice (using older insufficient voice codecs no less) and are now essentially locked in to a suboptimal bandwidth allocation. They must didn’t realise the importance of data when originally designing their hardware. And hardware in space is expensive to change.