[nomel]

> Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share

Several mobile carriers are already using them for backend of remote towers.

[AntiUSAbah]

For something relevant? Why would they do this? Dark fibers is an easy thing and you need to put power to these remote towers anyway.

[nomel]

You need a cell tower every 20 miles or so, less for a performant one. There's not dark fiber at that density in remote regions (remote is, by definition, lacking infrastructure). There's a better chance of power, and for the cases there's not, solar/battery is fine for a cell tower, especially one designed for lower power remote installations.

[AntiUSAbah]

The initial cost for a dark fibre on a power pool is very low and can give you low latency and high bandwidth.

Starlink antenna needs a lot more energy and has a high montly cost.

That shouldn't be very economically for long.

[AntiUSAbah]

And to add to this: They still have packet loss when they switch the satelites every 1-4 minutes.

[nomel]

Packet loss is an assumption with cellular, so accommodations are built into all stages, including the variable rate vocoders used! And, a bit of packet loss is still better than literally no service, which was the previously, economically driven, state for these places.

There's a 20% increase in satellites planned, with possible 300% increase in the future, so it should reduce.

[fragmede]

If only there was some sort of transmission control protocol that was resilient to packet loss!