[kbaker]

Anyone know what the downlink bandwidth might be for this system (i.e. not to the user, but to the Internet backbone?)

Seems like only a few customers at 1 Gb/s could saturate the network pretty quickly. Especially if the coverage area is a few hundred square miles.

[kristofferR]

"Each satellite will provide aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...

[Robotbeat]

That's just the initial system. And there will be, say, 30 satellites in view at any one time, giving an aggregate of 600 Gbps. At a typical 100:1 over-subscription ratio, they should be capable of serving almost a million customers per region (~500km diameter) at that speed. At more reasonable 10 or 100Mbps, it's on the order of tens of millions of customers in a region.

But that's just the initial constellation. SpaceX plans to put 12,000 total satellites up, with the VLEO ones having much higher throughput. Idea is to replace them every 4-6 years with faster throughput.