  The development of a future, global quantum communication network (or quantum
internet) will enable high rate private communication and entanglement
distribution over very long distances. However, the large-scale performance of
ground-based quantum networks (which employ photons as information carriers
through optical-fibres) is fundamentally limited by the fibre quality and link
length. While these fundamental limits are well established for arbitrary
network architectures, the question of how to best design these global
architectures remains open. In this work, we take a step forward in addressing
this problem by modelling global quantum networks with weakly-regular
architectures. Such networks are capable of idealising end-to-end performance
whilst remaining sufficiently realistic. In this way, we may investigate the
effectiveness of large-scale networks with consistent connective properties,
and unveil the global conditions under which end-to-end rates remain
analytically computable. Furthermore, by comparing the performance of ideal,
ground-based quantum networks with satellite quantum communication protocols,
we can establish conditions for which satellites can be used to outperform
fibre-based quantum infrastructure.
