[rcxdude]

Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.

[ethin]

Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.

[IncreasePosts]

Ground based infrastructure is much easier to justify in densely populated areas. So, dense areas get ground infra, and the dispersed rural population can get satellite infra

[fc417fc802]

> it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area,

I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?

[unusualmonkey]

Starlink is useful, but people often confuse coverage with capacity density.

The rough hierarchy is: fixed fiber/cable > Wi-Fi > cellular > LEO satellite > traditional GEO satellite. Starlink is a huge improvement over old satellite internet, but it is still fundamentally a satellite system, not dense terrestrial infrastructure.

As a rough illustration, suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles and has 6 Gbps of usable downlink. At New York City density, that footprint contains about 1.85 million people. That works out to roughly 3 kbps per person. For comparison, network planners typically budget on the order of Mbps per person to comfortably support peak demand in dense urban environments.

You can improve that with more satellites, more beams, more spectrum, and better hardware. But even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. Additionally, this all adds cost... that isn't needed for the vast majority of time or space that the sattelites will be over. If the sattelites orbiting over New York also orbit over the Sahara Desert - every $ spent improving NY capacity is also improving the Sahara... but with no return.

The reason fiber, cable, Wi-Fi, and cellular work so well in cities is spatial reuse. Capacity can be reused block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, tower by tower, and access point by access point. A beam from hundreds of kilometers overhead covers a much larger area.

So Starlink is excellent for rural areas, ships, aircraft, remote sites, disaster recovery, and backup connectivity. But it is not a replacement for terrestrial broadband in dense cities. It solves coverage much better than it solves urban capacity.

[fc417fc802]

> suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles

Is that the actual figure though?

> even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person.

TBF even that would be quite useful for lots of things seeing as it's faster than the DSL service I once had. However agreed that it isn't going to replace fiber service and overbuilding to such an extent for outliers would be absurd.

Still, that's quite decent considering it's an estimate of a near worst case scenario.