So if the orbital period is about an hour and a half to two hours, does that mean that you can expect to hold on to a single satellite's signal for about 40-50 minutes? Longer? I wonder how much power a cell phone will have to use to track a satellite that's moving through the sky - if the tracking will dominate power usage, or sending and receiving the signal will and we won't see much change.
I wonder how this will be different (if at all) from GEO satellites when it's cloudy. Could you presumably find a satellite near the horizon to use to bypass the clouds?
Much less - these satellites are low, so you're not going to have line-of-sight for anything near half the orbital period. Not sure about the precise numbers, but I know Iridium was really challenged by the requirement for clients to roam between satellites on the order of once a minute. As they demonstrated, though, it's a solvable problem.
I wonder how this will be different (if at all) from GEO satellites when it's cloudy. Could you presumably find a satellite near the horizon to use to bypass the clouds?