Low Earth orbit

Old television satellites sit about 36,000 kilometres up. A signal takes a noticeable moment to get there and back. You hear the pause on a phone call.

Low Earth orbit, often shortened to LEO, is a few hundred kilometres up. The wait is short enough for a conversation. The catch is that no single satellite stays over Reedford. Each one races across the sky in minutes, so you need many of them, handing the call from one to the next like runners passing a baton.

That is the shape that made a dish on an ordinary building useful, and later let some phones talk to space without a dish at all.

One company’s name comes up first whenever people talk about this. It is not the only one, and the next page splits the two products that both use this orbit.

The tempting mistake is to picture the slow, high television satellite when someone says “satellite internet.”

That is what lets you tell a dish from a phone.