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Hell of a lot of places without 5G, or any, mobile internet. Don't forget aviation and to a lesser extent maritime either. People love their onboard wifi.

Owning the launch platform could mean that he's able to significantly undercut current players, although funnily enough soon-to-be competitor Iridium recently launched a whole bunch of new satellites using SpaceX. Good position to be in when your competitors are dependent on you!

There are certainly challenges, though. Latency is a huge problem with satellite internet, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure what the intended bandwidth is but satellite will always "feel" slower than mobile data of equivalent speed. The fact that it's a mesh network with who knows how many "hops" presumably makes it even worse. So it won't ever compete with mobile, not even 3G probably.

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1) Starlink will be in LEO around 800mi up unlike most communications satellites (like HughesNet) which are in geostationary orbit at ~22,200mi. Expect 25-35ms latency as compared to 600+.

2) due to having a lot more birds in the air at lower altitude with newer tech, they should be competitive with 5G networks speed wise as compared to existing satellite internet.

Edit: fixed distance typo for HughesNet

22,000ft -> 22,000 miles.

Huh. That's really close.

Your numbers are off though. Firstly it's ~40ms up to the bird if it's right above you, then 40 down to the base station if it is next door to your house. If it's on the other side of the world and has to travel around the whole mesh, add a hundred ms at best. Then from the base station to the destination - which could be anywhere in the world, and back, then back up to the bird, then back down to you.

It's not going to be 40ms, probably not even 400ms, and there is no way it will be competitive with mobile 5G.

It might not even be competitive with the geostationary birds for accessing nearby hosts. 22k miles is ~120ms, so 240ms round trip - because the base station is generally pretty nearby. Say ~20ms both ways for in-country ping and you're looking at 520ms -ish total, which is reasonably consistent with my experience using it from the Solomon Islands.

Huawei's saying 1ms to the tower for 5G!

I make it 4ms [1], not 40ms.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=800mi+%2F+speed+of+ligh...

* facepalm

Too late to edit. Misplaced the decimal point. Should have noticed that if 22k is 120, 800 can't possibly be 40. Duh.

Still, the actual latency is going to be very dependent on the distance to the base station. If it's nearby then shit, yeah, that will be within 20ms of 5G. Point conceded @jsjohnst.

It doesn’t make sense to bounce a signal over North America / Europe / etc all around on the mesh. The best course is to send it to the ground almost immediately (aka <2-3x max) for those areas as otherwise you’re wasting bandwidth. But over the Pacific Ocean it makes complete sense as adding a ground station in the middle of the ocean doesn’t make sense and even if you did, you still have latency to nearest server farm.

So yes, my point still stands for the majority use case.

Also, to be clear, I was making following claims:

1) bandwidth on par with initial 5G deployments (aka up to 1gb/sec offering)

2) Latency on par or better than existing LTE networks.

Yeah, my skepticism was definitely misplaced. I guess I didn't internalise just how close that is! Mea culpa.

This could open astounding possibilities if the prices are set within any kind of consumer-affordable level. I'm fairly interested in going on some long sail journeys, for example, but the total lack of connectivity (without a ruinously expensive and hence rare conventional satphone) gives me a lot of pause. What if something happens at work, or worse yet with my family, and i'm literally uncontactable, hundreds of miles offshore somewhere for a week? I know that for some people that's the point, but I wouldn't be able to stop worrying about it.

If your prognosis is correct then not only might it become feasible to be contactable on a boat for a reasonable outlay, you might even have friggin' broadband. For me and I suspect many others that's a very exciting idea.

It’ll never be 4ms in the best case though. Both fiber and radio signals are a lot less than 100% of speed of light.

(Know you likely know this, but not everyone does)

> Don't forget aviation and to a lesser extent maritime either.

And trains, busses (it might be orders of magnitude cheaper than paying for cell data to provide those local hotspots people use on busses to/from work everyday), cars (I could easily see teslas using it over cell for data in the future), and rural areas where laying fiber is expensive.

StarLink will be mostly in LEO, so latency will be competitive with terrestrial services.

Depends on the terrestrial service. When I used to have FIOS, many places on the web were sub-10ms. HFC ISPs however are typically in the range Starlink will be in though (25-35ms) which is already better than many cellular data networks by a factor of ~2.

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