How Starlink satellites work
Thousands of small satellites fly low and fast over the Earth. A dish on your roof talks to whichever one is overhead, and that satellite hands your traffic to a gateway on the ground, or passes it by laser to another satellite when no gateway is in reach. Watch them fly over a slice of the Earth, follow the traffic, and break it.
Loading the model…
Right now, for the house
- Satellite in use
- None in reach
- Route
- None
- Laser links on the way
- –
- Distance, dish to gateway
- –
- Light takes, one way
- –
- Next satellite pick
- –
Close to the ground, and never still.
Flying low makes the connection quick, and it's also why there are so many satellites. Each one sees only a patch of the Earth and crosses it in minutes, so the network keeps handing your dish from one satellite to the next.
- About 550 km up
Low, on purpose
Most satellite internet used to come from 36,000 km up, so every reply took more than half a second. At 550 km the trip up and down takes a few thousandths of a second.
- About 27,320 km/h
Always moving
Each satellite goes around the Earth every 96 minutes and crosses your sky in a few. No single one stays overhead, so it takes thousands of them.
- 25° and up
A patch of sky
A dish only uses satellites at least 25° above its horizon. From 550 km up, that's ground about 940 km away in each direction.
- Every 15 seconds
A new pick
The network gives each dish a satellite for 15 seconds at a time, then picks again. The dish steers its beam electronically, with no moving parts.
Up, and straight back down.
Near land, the satellite over your dish can usually see a gateway too: a fenced pad with a row of dishes under white domes and fiber to the internet. The satellite simply relays your signal down to it, and the reply comes back the same way.
That only works when both are under the same satellite. Past roughly 1,880 km apart, the curve of the Earth puts them out of reach of any one satellite.
Satellite to satellite, in space.
Newer satellites carry laser terminals aimed at their neighbors. When the satellite over a boat, a plane or a remote cabin can't see a gateway, it passes the traffic along by laser until one of them can.
Light in a vacuum travels about 47% faster than in glass fiber, so over long distances the path through space can even beat a cable on the ground.
Most problems are on the ground.
The network routes around a failed satellite or a gateway that's down, usually before anyone notices. What people do notice is usually closer to home: a tree, a roof edge or a pinched cable. Pick one to see it on the model.
Lasers off
This is how the first satellites worked. The house is fine, because a satellite above it can see a gateway. The boat has no satellite that can, so it has no service.
What you'd notice: At sea or in remote places: no connection at all, or only when you're within a few hundred miles of a gateway.
A satellite fails
The satellite carrying the boat's traffic stops answering. The network routes around it through the next orbit over, and the boat's dish picks another satellite if it was using that one.
What you'd notice: Usually nothing, or a second or two while the route changes.
A gateway goes down
Gateway East loses its fiber. Everything that used it moves to Gateway West, and the boat's traffic takes a longer laser path to get there.
What you'd notice: A slightly slower connection for a while, which few people would ever notice.
A tree in the way
A pine west of the house hides part of the sky. The network assigns the dish a satellite without knowing about the tree, and whenever that satellite is behind it, the house drops offline until the next one comes up. With only two orbits on the model the gaps last a while; with thousands of real satellites overhead they're usually a few seconds.
What you'd notice: Video calls that freeze for a few seconds every few minutes, while speed tests look fine. The app shows the obstruction map.
For a steady connection
A clear view of the sky
The dish needs a wide cone of open sky, mostly toward the north in New Hampshire. The app has a sky scan that shows what's in the way.
Mount it high
On the roof ridge or a pole, above trees and chimneys. A spot that's clear in winter may not be once the leaves come back.
Mind the cable
The cable carries power and data. Don't pinch it in a window or a door, and give it a drip loop where it comes into the house.
Snow and heavy rain
The dish melts light snow on its own. Heavy rain or wet snow can slow it or drop it for a few minutes.
A dish is enough for AI.
Farms, stables, camps and contractors in the hills often run the whole business on a dish. That's plenty for the AI tools a small business uses. The harder parts are a phone nobody is near and a connection that drops without anyone knowing why.
Calls that still get answered
On a farm, a camp or a job site, the office phone is often the one nobody is near. A phone agent answers on the internet line, takes down what the caller needs and texts it to whoever is out in the field.
AI voice agentsAI tools that work fine on a dish
A few hundredths of a second of delay don't matter to drafting an estimate or reading a contract, so cloud AI works well over satellite. We set the tools up around your work and show the team how to use them.
AI Cowork trainingKnow why the connection drops
An agent can read the router's outage history every morning, match the drops to a tree, the weather or a busy hour, and send a short note to whoever looks after the equipment.
Custom AI agents
Starlink is a SpaceX service, and T10 isn't affiliated with SpaceX. This page shows a simplified model for learning: two neighboring orbits instead of dozens, a few satellites instead of thousands, and heights and sizes exaggerated so you can see them. The distances along the ground, the satellites' height and speed, and the times light takes are worked out for the model's layout. It is not a description of how SpaceX schedules or routes its network.
