  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 fibre quality and link
length, with the latter being a primary design factor for practical network
architectures. While these fundamental limits are well established for
arbitrary network topologies, the question of how to best design global
architectures remains open. In this work, we introduce a large-scale quantum
network model called weakly-regular architectures. Such networks are capable of
idealising network connectivity, provide freedom to capture a broad class of
spatial topologies and remain analytically treatable. This allows us to
investigate the effectiveness of large-scale networks with consistent
connective properties, and unveil critical conditions under which end-to-end
rates remain optimal. Furthermore, through a strict performance comparison of
ideal, ground-based quantum networks with that of realistic satellite quantum
communication protocols, we establish conditions for which satellites can be
used to outperform fibre-based quantum infrastructure; {rigorously proving the
efficacy of satellite-based technologies for global quantum communications.
