[colechristensen]

I don't know if that kind of information is public. Starlink is continually adding new satellites, and each one adds bandwidth capability. Likewise with end user ground station hardware updates and spectrum purchases (at least the former is happening on a regular basis), capacity likewise goes up.

I don't believe there is a theoretical or practical upper limit which would exclude very wide adoption of Starlink and similar competitors.

Put in another way, I think it is possible that in a decade or two the only cell phone/data service that doesn't come from orbit will be a few terrestrial towers in dense downtown urban areas and around things like sports venues.

[CorrectHorseBat]

5G is going exactly the opposite way to provide higher bandwidth, more cells with each less users.

With satellite internet you're sharing the medium with everyone, and that doesn't scale well. Beamforming probably helps a lot, but I don't how accurate it can be on that distance.

[Retric]

You can have essentially unlimited satellites the issue is the percentage of time each one spends over high density areas.

Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic network is done.

[CorrectHorseBat]

You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).

[Retric]

Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites.

As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.

[CorrectHorseBat]

How is that relevant? Adding satellites over the Pacific doesn't improve New York's service. The question is how dense of a population they can serve, not how many satellites Starlink could theoretically have.

[Retric]

The only way to add one satellite over NYC on average is to also add several satellites over the ocean and other low density parts of the earth. If you want low latency individual satellites must be in LEO which means they spend most of their time over water and low density bits of land.

Which gets back to my original point where increasing the maximum density inherently reduces the average utilization of each satellite. There simply aren’t enough people living in Iowa etc to balance the east coast.

[Sparyjerry]

Musk himself has said Starlink is not designed for cities and fiber is a much better option there. To supply say NYC, you would need also be supplying bandwidth to the entire world underneath the orbit that the satellites. That is a lot of wasted satellite time as it flies around the earth with zero users most of the time just for the brief moment while users spike to the scale of a city like NYC.

[Retric]

Yea, fiber + 5G + Starlink is more efficient than any of those technologies alone.

It’s always worth remembering that efficiency and technical limitations are different things. We could absolutely blanket the US in 5G towers but the cost is vastly higher than the benefit.