[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.

[Retric]

> Because you're sharing the medium you'll get interference if multiple satellites service the same area

I’m going to simplify because you seem to misunderstand what’s going on.

Your eyes allow you to see a clear image of your surroundings because photons come from even slightly different angles aren’t interfering with each other. Starlink uses a phased array antenna to achieve a similar effect where satellites in different locations broadcasting on the same frequency can be clearly distinguished by two base stations physically next to each other. And similarly two different satellites can receive clear signals when two Starlink antennas are broadcasting when physically next to each other at the same instant.

There’s physical limits and the phased array antenna in use are much worse than theoretically possible. But, the technology they are currently using really does scale vastly beyond what’s economical viable.