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Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

If Starlink didn't route data in space and instead used space only as a last mile, would it be significantly cheaper, or have higher bandwidth, or be feasible to provide without data caps? What are the economic and technical tradeoffs here?

I don't mind the latency of today's fiber or cable Internet, and if it's problem, it can be solved by moving servers closer to users.

That is, what if, instead of bypassing the fiber backbone, Starlink just tried to connect everyone to it? Because I'm assuming that sending a terabit of data between two major cities, like Chennai to NYC is going to be cheaper via undersea fiber.

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The problem it certainly going to be uplink/downlink - even with this massive constellation, you're fairly limited by the available RF spectrum. If you had a decently high subscription rate in a reasonably densely populated area, you'd probably be down to dozens of megabits per second per user at most.

This could deliver absolutely massively better internet in less populated areas like rural, shipping, etc. but I feel like people are perhaps getting the wrong idea and thinking this could supersede terrestrial networks in urban/surburban areas - in which case there will be a lot of disappointed people.

I didn't ask about users in densely populated areas. Imagine two villagers on opposite sides of the world communicating via Starlink. Would it be cheaper per bit for Starlink to offload the data to the nearest metro area, from where it can travel around the world by fiber, till the closest metro area for the receiver, at which point it gets sent via satellite? In other words, use satellite only as the last mile on each end, not for the backbone.

If you're in the middle of the Pacific it won't work unless the satellites talk to each other and route the data to a ground station that may be thousands of miles away.

Sure but most people don't live in the middle of the Pacific, so is an optimised system possible for them?

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