Comment by acheron9383

The satellite emulates a cell tower, just one that is hundreds of miles away and moving very fast. So some tricks with the timing will need to happen since LTE expects the tower to be close and not moving. How big a cell is depends on how powerful the phased array beam former is on the satellite. The achievable data rates aren't very high so this is more a network of last resort when you are out of range of a tower.