[kilroy123]

But now there's massive opposition to building on land.

If you just build in space no one will be able to hold up those permits.

For what it's worth I don't disagree with you.

This depends on ridiculously low costs to orbit. But there truly is unlimited power up there from the sun.

[olyjohn]

This is exactly why Starlink is successful. If we had decent regulations, and had actual good internet on the ground, why would we bother going to outer space? The truth is that it's cheaper to build an ISP in space to work around the corruption that has kept all these monopolies in power.

[amluto]

I disagree.

Regulations or not, building a terrestrial network is expensive. Once all the permits are granted, it still costs on the order of $5/foot ($25k/mile) to buy and install fiber. (Cost varies with labor costs and by installation type, obviously.) And you need backhaul, multiplexers or switches, etc.

In a fairly dense area with a lot of customers and proximity to existing transit providers, fiber is very cost effective. In a rural area with long last-mile links and few customers, fiber is more expensive and satellite can win.

Starlink has another potential issue in dense areas: limited bandwidth. The beams from satellites that are near each other can interfere with each other, so doubling the number of satellites may not double the aggregate bandwidth available in a given small, densely populated area. In contrast, fiber scales better than linearly up to huge bandwidth: installing 10 strands of fiber is much less than twice as expensive as installing five strands, and the bandwidth available per single-mode strand has been increasing over time without any requirement to use fancier fiber.

[lolc]

I'm under the assumption that Starlink will never provide more than one percent of the mobile bandwidth in a developed country. Because they can't match dense antenna webs in cities. Am I wrong?