JF Mezei wrote on Mon, 19 Nov 2018
18:40:01 -0500:


Number of ground stations needed is relative to how much capacity the
uplink has, and how many end users will be connecting to the Internet
via that ground station.


That number is essentially zero. 'End users' each have their own
'user terminal' and are leaf nodes on the network.


Once you have too many end-users connecting via
that uplink, you start to have congestion and need to build a second
ground station far enough away to allow re-use of spectrum with
different satellites acting as links to the ground station as they pass
over.


The system will use highly directional phased array antennae for
uplink/downlink. That means you won't see a lot of frequency
contention.


Having multiple satellites connecting to same ground station may not be
as efficient as having only one connecting at a time. Having 1 large
chunk of spectrum allows greater "compression" than splitting that
spectrum in 2 and having 2 separate satellites talk to the ground station.


Doing both will be more efficient. You'd hardly want to bottleneck
all the traffic for Netflix, say, through a single uplink.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn