It’s kind of like a registry of all your files. The uplink (customer) asks the satellite for a specific file, the satellite responds with a list of nodes that have pieces of that file. This is all very small and merely an exchange of metadata. The uplink then downloads the required number pieces from nodes directly. Remember that for any segment, any 29 pieces will do to recreate it. Assuming default settings. As @Alexey mentioned, these settings can be tuned for specific use cases. But in any case, the customer downloads the data directly from nodes in a parallel fashion and in that way is able to get much higher transfer speeds by aggregating node transfer speeds, compared to sequential downloading from individual nodes.
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