Statistical Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
50,437

Also the longer the slant the larger area the weather is impacting you. If the beam is coming in close to the horizon it isn't just the weather where you are that matters it is the weather along the entire slant potentially a thousand or more kilometers away. It could be bright sunny day where you are at and the signal has to punch through a dozen storm systems to get to you.

It is why Starlink was such a big deal for the Antarctica bases. Prior to that they were limited to very expensive MEO constellation services or a 2 or 3 GSO sats (one of the TRDS sats) that are actually at an 8.7 degree inclination instead of the normal 0. The sats are in GSO not GEO. It means the sats trace a figure eight around the equator instead of being exactly on it. It also means that they move in the sky as seen from Earth which is very much non-ideal for most applications BUT it means that for roughly 12 hours out of each day they are just barely over the horizon from the Antarctic bases to allow service. Bad news that 12 hour availability window shifts by 3 minutes each day. Being a network engineer in Antarctica prior to SL must have been a challenge prior to SL.

The Antarctic specific satellite mission is the only polar GSO service I know of. SL pretty much overnight changed that. Not only are their official SL dishes but there are now dozens of user owned terminals. Throughput to Antarctica was in the 1 to 5 Mbps range for decades and now is in the hundreds of Mbps and gigabits is possible with enough user terminals.