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ruszkiyesterday at 8:12 AM2 repliesview on HN

What does it give to the military, what they haven’t had already? Better round trip time?


Replies

pgalvinyesterday at 9:25 AM

I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:

- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,

- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),

- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.

Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.

inemesitaffiayesterday at 11:36 AM

Weight, Cost, bandwidth, polar availablity.

In Guam it means 10Gbps without Fiber.