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The reasonably credible Wall Street Journal has a YouTube channel and the new video SpaceX vs. China: The Quest for Satellite Internet | WSJ says that with Starlink's data rate I can download a 1 Gb movie in (roughly) 10 seconds.

It then goes on to talk about China's plan to implement a constellation of 6G satellites (10,000 of them I think) that can provide a Terabit per second; 1000 movies in 1 second!

I think that I have heard of short range (few meters) RF or wired technologies that can do this, and of course in optical fibers with fancy modulation schemes, polarizations, and many wavelengths, single fiber speeds can reach close to 1 Terabit per second over useful distances, and that's because 1.5 micron wavelength light has a frequency of about 200 THz, they're only using a small bit of the possible bandwidth where the wavelength dispersion is low for the best long-haul single mode fiber.

But from LEO to me through Earth's atmosphere and weather, how will I be able to download one thousand movies per second from a satellite constellation. How does this work exactly?

Question: How (the heck) is it possible that with China's future 6G satellite network I'll be able to download 1000 movies per second?

screenshot from Wall Street Journal video SpaceX vs. China: The Quest for Satellite Internet | WSJ

screenshot from Wall Street Journal video SpaceX vs. China: The Quest for Satellite Internet | WSJ

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    $\begingroup$ My best guess is that the person who researched this, either doesn't speak Mandarin very well, is not familiar with satellite Internet, or both, and mixed up the data rates of the entire network, or at at least an entire satellite, and an individual link. (This is assuming the data was published in Mandarin. If it was published in English, it is similarly possible that the person responsible for publishing the English data sheets does not actually speak English very well.) $\endgroup$
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Commented Jun 18, 2021 at 16:03
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    $\begingroup$ Also, apparently, the author of that video does not understand the difference between bits and bytes. $\endgroup$
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Commented Jun 18, 2021 at 16:06
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    $\begingroup$ @JörgWMittag perhaps this will end up on this list :-) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 18, 2021 at 16:35
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    $\begingroup$ My immediate reaction was, well, 99% of all movies are the same, so data compression :-) $\endgroup$
    – Carl Witthoft
    Commented Jun 21, 2021 at 13:44
  • $\begingroup$ The mobile industry and the stock market is a two-head monster auto-feeding on hype (and big numbers). The content providers are not interested in a model where you download zeta bytes of content to consume them offline. Their "bread-and-butter" is tracking your preferences and activities. $\endgroup$
    – Ng Ph
    Commented Jul 6, 2021 at 9:44

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