Satellite Link Technologies

This one is for all you Starlink and Skymesh users who have to use them due to the remoteness of their properties. In these technologies there is two examples of how they are deployed, which provide very remote customers with access to the internet.

Geostationary

This is commonly what is offered via Skymesh, the way it functions is there is a base-station and a satellite access station placed in space, this satellite is placed a long distance from earth which allows a single satellite to provide coverage for a large area the reason this is possible is due to the concept of transmit aperture this is approximately a cone formed by the transmitters and receivers on a satellite these systems are typically very high bandwidth single potentially more satellite if there is more than one they use what is called an ISL (Inter-satellite link) this forms a bridge between two or more satellites which can either be done using another radiolink like the transducers and transceivers on the actual satellite, or they can use a point-to-point connection using a laser beam. These connection services are often positioned over 30,000km away from the earth and as such although they can theoretically reach very fast maximum speeds they have a number of factors which severely impact their reliability firstly they are heavily influenced by scattering, reflection, refraction, diffraction and absorption. Scattering is when a radiowave hits something like water molecules resulting in multipath loss what does that mean? it means the radiowaves are no longer coherent and have echos and other characteristics which indirectly leads to signal power loss, same problems are experienced with the other properties these problems affect both LEO based and Geostationary.

n. As such they tend to be quite significantly affected by weather, meaning on a very thick cloudy and or thick fog can severely impact the speed of your connection secondly due to the large distance from earth radio-waves are subject to the propagation delay this means geostationary satellite will always have high latency which makes them unsuitable for things like fast paced multiplayer videogames, purely due to the introduced latency from the transmit and reception from the the signal coming from the the satellite.

Low Earth Orbit

This is what people commonly talk about as Starlink, this is what we call a low earth orbit satellite constellation, where the workload between satellite is distributed across a fully connected mesh network, that simply means all the satellite have an ISL (Inter-satellite link) is used to connect all of these small "cellphone towers" in space because that is effectively what they are, using a phased array antenna the to create a wide enough transmit aperture multiple satellite as needed this is why there is so many Starlink sats deployed up there, it is to allow them to have the maximum coverage possible by swarming together the satellites to make them behave as a single network and ensure the best coverage. Secondly low earth satellite purely because of their nature have much lower latency travel time to the satellite is much shorter and therefore high speeds are possible and low enough latency for online gaming. Several things should be considered with Starlink is firstly the tracking antenna in general your access service terminal the device that connects to the starlink network can benefit greatly by purchasing a tracking antenna what this does it it will move in response to the satellites moving this ensures your starlink dish is always at the best possible angle as it travels across the low earth orbit point to maximise signal reliability.