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SpaceX Worried Fake Competitors Could Disrupt Its Space Internet Plan
Jason Koebler writes: The biggest impediment to SpaceX's plan to create a worldwide, satellite broadband network might not be the sheer technological difficulty of putting 4,000 satellites into space. Instead, outdated international and domestic regulations on satellite communications could stand in the way, according to a new Federal Communications Commission filing by the company. The company's attorneys wrote that the FCC might make it too easy for competitors to reserve communications bandwidth that they will never use. "Spectrum warehousing can be extremely detrimental and unprepared, highly speculative, or disingenuous applicants must be prevented from pursuing 'paper satellites' (or 'paper constellations'), which can unjustly obstruct and delay qualified applicants from deploying their systems."
Did you read the summary? It said 4000 satellites. To need that many satellites to ensure global coverage it must be a LEO satellite constellation. So the latency won't be worse than a transatlantic trip via fiber optic. The article says a 750 mile orbit so the round trip is 1500 miles. According to Google 1500 miles/speed of light is 8.05 ms. If they include caches on the satellites for web traffic the latency can be even less.