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Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a viable business model could be hybrid solution where mobile carriers partner to create LTE and 5G towers with Starlink uplinks. This would make it easier for carriers to deploy towers in remote locations. It’s my understanding that the primary challenge for deploying towers in underserved areas is lack of existing infrastructure for uplink. Call me crazy, but if you could solar power the ground station you could plop them anywhere on earth.

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This is actually believed to be the first market SpaceX is going to go after. It lets them focus more on the tech and make sure it works before trying to scale things like the production of the phased array antennas to the point an average consumer can afford it or even things like user signups and subscriptions and all the legal "fun" that will come with trying to be a last-mile providers globally.

Some of their largest markets are going to be in countries where people cannot afford to have their own phased array antennas anyways. So yeah, especially early this will probably be their market.

Perhaps if you know a guy who does solar and batteries, you could avoid the carrier partnership altogether... ;)

Put the transceivers on the roofs of cars. Then make the cars rolling supercomputers -- oh, already done! Then start selling a part of the compute power of the cars as a cloud with no search warrantable address. All of the virtual servers will be ephemeral and will migrate such that they're only ever running on moving cars.

Elon said the receivers are too big to put in the roof of a car. But that it might be possible to engineer one small enough.

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