[Egonex]

People think that with better D2D technology, emergency and telemetry messages will still be short and to the point. These messages will not be like streaming videos.

When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.

I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.

[bobdvb]

Spectrum contention is going to be insane in D2D.

Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.

[lxgr]

Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).

[bobdvb]

It's definitely competing in rural areas, but Starlink does suffer from physical limitations on the number of terminals per geographic area.

This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.

For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.

[lxgr]

With small enough spot beams, the difference between a large rural cell and a very narrow direct-to-device spot beam footprint is really not that big anymore. Starlink apparently already offers video calling over direct to cell in the US via T-Mobile!