[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.

[CorrectHorseBat]

Sure, but my point was that there's a maximum density you can get which won't be enough for NYC or even a much less dense city.

[Retric]

The current network can handle 1 home per square km on average but averages over a very large area. So ~2,000 as many satellites and you can handle NYC’s population.

It’s actually less than you expect because you can make use of satellites a hundred miles out to the sea, over the Hudson River, and even suburbs. And that’s before considering how few people would pick Starlink when they can use cheap fiber.

[CorrectHorseBat]

Well no, that's my whole point. Because you're sharing the medium you'll get interference if multiple satellites service the same area.

>And that’s before considering how few people would pick Starlink when they can use cheap fiber.

Obviously we're talking about how dense an area Startlink can service on its own.