Hugh Lam

So I actually was on a plane yesterday from Melbourne to Sydney coming back.

It was a Qantas flight.

And I was like, oh, cool.

That's great.

There's Wi-Fi actually enabled on the flight.

It worked for about five minutes or so, but then the internet got really, really choppy.

And guess what I was doing on the flight?

I was actually researching about rockets for this podcast.

So there you go.

But

The internet was like disconnecting.

I was like, okay, well, what type of satellites do they use?

So Qantas actually use GEO satellites.

These are the satellites that sit really far into orbit.

So we're talking about 35,000 kilometers into orbit.

Typically, when you go high into orbit, you're going to have lower latency.

And typically with GEO satellites, they're going to be a lot more applicable to things like

weather and just broadcasting in general, because you've got a very fixed location.

Say you wanted to provide weather forecasting services for Australia, you can stay in GEO and just stay there and provide that sort of coverage area.

But when you're talking about internet, you really need to be closer to obviously where the devices are.