Thanks to all for the sanity check. Always depressing when you think you may have a good argument but after much reading, you find out you don't :-( BTW, in case someone knows. With the recent "beam" satellites having a lot of different focused antennas, how does the uplink work ? Does all traffic pass through a central "switch" which then directs packets to the approperiate antenna ? Would a each beam directed at a served area be paired with its own dedicated beam directed at ground station ? Or does the uplink from ground station carry traffic for multiple beams and thus becomes the bottleneck ? (Xplornet bragged about its next satellite having 20gbps capacity, but IF the uplink from ground station is also at 20gps and serves 5 beams aimed at Canada, then on average each beam only gets 4gbps ?) With regards to the "dream" of having 350 low orbit satellites covering the globe for Internet, does anyone know how the uplink will be done? Won't there be a bottleneck if in serving Canada's north, satellites currently speeding over the region have to use satellite-to-satellite links to carry information until it reaches a satellite that is over a ground station in the south ? or is it expected that ground stations will be built "near" each area to be served ? (Am trying to justify that satellite should be reserved for people truly isolated and that Nunavut communities should get undersea fibre and work need to start now because of long construction times during which satellites will fall further back in terms of capacity needs).