Starlink internet

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I know nothing about the tech involved, but how is it that Starlink is able to get the latency down so low? In my simple brain, I just picture the data still having to travel up the the sats and then back down again, which obviously used to take some time. I'm curious what Starlink does to speed up that process.

The old school Hughsnet sats (the powerful ones) are 22,000 miles up (like our MIL sats). Your signal goes out your sat dish, up to the satellite, down to the nearest datacenter to the user (Atlanta / NewYork / Dalls / LA / Frisco / etc. ) then to the internet website etc, you are trying to reach, then back to datacenbter uplink to sattelite then down back to your dish / router. this round trip signal (every mouse click) happens in about 3/4th of one second of 750ms (ping 750) The fact that it even works at all is a miracle.

Starlink works with satellites are 340 miles above the earth, but instead of one big powerful sat there are thousands in a net over the northern hemisphere (think like how cell phone towers work / same principle) and growing to a pop of about 12000 sats to cover every bit of the planet. The signal go directly to the sats and back in approximaly 1/50th of a second or a latency of 25ms (Pings 25) for every mouse click etc.

Latency / Ping is very important to end user satisfaction. but when there was only one game in town big ole hughes net had no intrest in changing the system. They spent 5 billion trying to supress Starlink from even getting a license because the knew they couldn't compete and all politicians are for sale, but hard to compete with the richest man on the planet.

A good tech comparison article:

Starlink vs. HughesNet vs. Viasat: Which Satellite Internet Provider Is Best?

Satellite internet is more competitive than ever, but which of the three big US services reigns supreme? Let's look the contenders, along with some upload, download, and latency data.

www.pcmag.com

 

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