[Jeff_Brown]

> 99.5% uptime over the course of a year

I had no idea geostationary satellites were so far away! (Per Google, 36,000 km -- about 6 times the radius of the Earth.)

[DennisP]

Plus the equator is tilted with respect to the Earth's orbit, so it's only around the equinoxes that a geostationary satellite is shadowed at all.