Hello! I'm going to try to explain this as painlessly as possible. I've stolen some graphics from our website and re-arranged them 🙂 First, we build a cool satellite and shoot it into space. We test it out and make sure it's working as intended then open it up to the general public. Once it's on the rocket and blasting off, we can only make adjustments to the panel angles, position, stuff like that. Most of the time the birds go up with extra equipment on board for future implementations (like the 4x4 switch on a truck). When we refer to "beams", they are technically known as spot beams but do what you think they do - "shine" down a blanket of coverage over the US to provide our services! When you see us say things like "performance improvements" or "network changes", we're referring to changes being made in 1 or 2 places (sometimes both). One may be at the Gateway, which are manned buildings filled with hardware we use to move traffic around. There are many across America, Mexico and Canada. The improvements or changes can come in the form of a couple of common forms like updated hardware or coding changes made at the Gateway or deployed right to your modem through a firmware update that gets automatically downloaded to your modem. These are usually reserved for small tweaks and changes. In your case, the improvements are being made at the Gateway. I hope I was able to get that across clearly!
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