zlacker

The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited

>>newscl+(OP)
There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.

>>jhgb+7b
That seems like it would make the most sense on the "last mile". So, adding caches to the LEO satellite ISP birds would be a good idea. I wonder if Kupiter, StarLink, et. al. do that. (And if not, their reasoning against it since they've surely considered it.)