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How are they accounting for the presumably very high timing advance?



As far as I understand, the timing advance only matters to compensate for differences in distance/latency between different devices (i.e. to avoid uplink transmissions to talk over each other on the same frequency).

The satellites can correct for "global" latency themselves (unless there are higher-level parts of the LTE/E-UTRA radio protocol that can't tolerate such long latencies, e.g. ARQ timers).

For GSM as a half-duplex technology, there's also the matter of devices not being able to transmit and receive at the same time, but I believe the same principle applies: As long as the timing differences between different devices in the same spot beam isn't too large, that's something the satellites could globally correct for.

The same probably applies for doppler corrections.




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