This is NOT the same as Satellite Internet lol.....Don't know why you people keep comparing for it.
Maybe cause the technics behind the electronic communication is the same?
Satellite Network is NOT a fixed network, you will need to be able to completely control the satellite in order for you to use it.
Nope. See my post you answered on.
GPS, you have network of Satellite for you to connect to,
Nope. In GPS the SAT sends a signal what your nav then translate together with other GPS-SAT-Signals from other GPS-SATs into coordinates. The nav do not connect to the GPS-SAT. Only receive.
when you are guiding a drone, you would have to use that same satellite for hours
Nope. Even transmission of vids can hop to other SAT while transmitting.
If you want an example, if you watch any live sport stream by Satellite (Like a football match), you will see most of the time the game will stop and freeze for a few second within that match, that is Buffering from changing satellite, image that happen when you are flying a drone for real time surveillance?
It would be an example if the TV-SATs would not tryed to be geo
en.wikipedia.org
What you maybe mean is if the e.g. a soccergame happens in Australia streamed over a geo-SAT over Australia and send from there to another geo-SAT which is e.g. over India and then from this India-SAT the stream then comes down to indian TV-stations. And there can be disturbances cause of e.g. densy clouds or sun erruptions or insufficient ground-receiver ect. pp..
In data networks, there normally (nowadays always) is a buffer on the reciving side. Since the beginning. The software of the reciving "network card" has a memory part where the recived data-packages get sorted in right order by the sequence-number of each package, depending on the transmit-protocol you use in your data-exchange, and then forwarded the so buffered and ordered packages in a defined bulk to the software what translate them into a vid. If one package is lost on the way, then the sender is informed to retransmit this package again. For e.g. TCP/IP-networks you can read something about here in this links
en.wikipedia.org
TCP Sequence Number is a 4-byte field in the TCP header that indicates the first byte of the outgoing segment. It helps to keep track of how much data has been transferred and received. The TCP Sequence Number field is always set, even when there is no data in the segment. For example, the...
www.howtouselinux.com
In vid streaming however protocols like TCP are not used cause there always can be a loss of a package and the informing of the sender and retransmission of every lost package will slow down viewing of the vid on the pc, tablet, whatever, cause of waiting for the retransmission of the lost package. So in IP world mostly the combination of UDP/IP is used for streaming, cause UDP do not have this control of lost packages. If a package is lost, UDP dont care. So vids can be seen without interuption. The loss of a package in UDP can then seen in the vids like there are some pixels or regions of a frame in the vid black or clutter or something like that.
And now lets look into the Elon-Musk-SAT-network. These SATs are all on low orbit and thus moving around the earth. So data from the ground sender have to hop from one SAT to another cause the SATs moving out of LOS and the sender have to hop to another SAT what comes into LOS. It is like you are sitting in a car with your mobile phone and streaming a vid while driving along a highway. The mobile phone have to hop off the base-station what is going out of LOS and hop on the base-station what is comming into LOS. And this works good if you do not drive to fast. The switch from one base station to another happend within a view ms with all the now managed new routing of the data-packages from the leaving base-station to the incoming new base-station and from there to your mobile phone. If you drive to fast, e.g. 150 miles per hour or more, you get interuptions in the vid cause the leaving base-station is faster going out of LOS than the incomming new base-station get the rerouted data stream for to send to you. And the same mechanism is with the Starlink-network. Whereas the SATs are high enough to cover a greater area and dens enough that the receiver have mostly two or more SATs he can connect to and moving slow enough around the world so the switching from one SAT to another wont interrupt your vid what you view in 25 frames per second. And the same is for sending, where the ground-station gets informed that it has to hop to a better/other SAT or the ground-station measure that the strength of the connection/signal of the SAT gets lower and thus for itself hops to another SAT with better quality. Glad to help you.
Edit:
In this link you can see some of the Starlink-SAT. If you click somewhere on the map you get info what SAT actually cover the region you right-clicked on...sometimes. Looks like its experimental and not always works.
. no the satellite only need to cover the area its duty of the ground control and drone to align their antenna toward the satellite
