Due to complications in US laws, this actually means that Starlink cannot directly offer service in much of the world, instead having to let a local company resell access. (Because SpaceX as a US company cannot do certain kinds of filtering without running afoul of US laws.)
Also, you presumably keep track of where your antenna is pointing anyway.
I find it very interesting because the governments see the control(or lack of) of the internet as an existential issue.
I am hoping for a censor-fee internet but I don't believe that it's possible. Someone will blow up these satellites if anyone happens to create a free(as in freedom) global communication network.
If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
The source is the original Starlink FCC filing: https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8174403/S...
But the point remains: The Starlink satellites do not just radiate omnidirectionally. Nor could they; the system is intended to eventually serve a meaningful fraction of the entire population on earth. This is not possible on non-steered RF. The only reason their plan has any sense is that every transmitter and receiver is directional, allowing efficient SDMA, where the same frequency can be used by multiple people simultaneously to communicate withe the same satellite, because the satellite can discriminate between their signals by the direction from which they were received.
Because of this, in order for Starlink to be able to communicate with you, it has to have a pretty good idea of where you are.
> Advanced phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies within the satellite payload give the system the ability to make highly efficient use of Ku- and Ka-band spectrum resources and the flexibility to share that spectrum with other licensed users. User terminals operating with the SpaceX System will use similar phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. Gateway earth stations also apply advanced phased array technologies to generate high-gain steered beams to communicate with multiple NGSO satellites from a single gateway site.
Details of the downlink beams is found at A3:
> All Ku-band downlink spot beams on each SpaceX satellite are independently steerable over the full field of view of the Earth.
Just read the entire A3.1 for more details.
(edit: I remembered wrong. 1.5 degrees, or at 550km, ~10 kilometers.)
This is all technical assumptions at this point since the service isn't rolled out, but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly.
It may simplify some things, but it also introduces lots of complications like managing satellite handovers, telemetry tracking for thousands of satellites, accident avoidance in space, etc.