[oliwarner]

GEO is 22236 miles up. Consider that you'll usually be bouncing data at least 50000 miles through the lossy atmosphere. It's the distance and lost packets that cause the main latency issues.

You could got for a LEO (upward of 500m) but they need much more power to stay up and you need so many more satellites. It's not impossible but I would have thought it to be prohibitively expensive for an ISP (or a cruise liner full of oldies).

Not to mention that this thing is going to connect to a base station and you're then your connection is in the hands of the actual fibre gods.

Compare that to a real connection: I have ADSL in the UK. I ping a server of mine in California. ~5000miles in 130ms. You could spend billions on a peering satellite network and your first hop (past any boat-board proxy) will still be longer than a DSL equivalent's whole TCP connection.

Unless, that is, they're using unicorns to beam the data with fairy dust neutrinos. That probably would be faster.

Note: I'm not saying annything about bandwidth. You can get crazy-high bandwidth through a P2P dish, but latency has always been an issue when you're dealing with orbits and the atmosphere.