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by ramidarigaz 4165 days ago
These are going to be LEO satellites (no higher than a few hundred km), instead of GEO satellites, which would make the lower bound of the latency pretty low (comparable to cable or DSL).
1 comments

This helped me visualize how close LEO satellites are, as well as how far away others are (e.g. GPS).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal...

Cool! Quick back-of-the-napkin indicates that the RTT for LEO satellites (at the upper bound) would be only ~4.7% of the RTT for GEO satellites. I'm sure there's much more to the story that I'm missing, but an LEO satellite should have a latency of around 11.75ms. In 2012, average US latency to Google was ~50-60ms [1]. Would bandwidth be the limiting factor?

[1] https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-perfor...