It's radio waves. Takes about 125 mSec for a request to reach the satellite (it's 36,000 km up there) and then the same amount of time to come back down.
If you can reach a terrestrial data center in 10 mSec over fiber, the flying data center is 12x slower. And now, like the other replay said, do a TCP handshake and see how long it takes.
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How does that introduce a delay?
The distance is greater = higher latency.
It’s why satellite internet was usually pretty terrible. A simple TCP handshake becomes a multi-second endeavor.
It's radio waves. Takes about 125 mSec for a request to reach the satellite (it's 36,000 km up there) and then the same amount of time to come back down.
If you can reach a terrestrial data center in 10 mSec over fiber, the flying data center is 12x slower. And now, like the other replay said, do a TCP handshake and see how long it takes.
because earth's geosync orbit is at 36k kilometers (function of gravitational force and rotation speed)