Not every country has the resources or desire to lay nation-wide fiber. Satellite internet could beneift millions of people who don't have access to reliable high-speed connections.
In the rest of the world, the ARPU is so low that it's hard to have a viable business model for broadband satellite connectivity (for all orbits GEO, MEO, or LEO). Furthermore, 90% of the population is currently covered by 3G/4G networks, so I would argue that for most of the 3.5 billion people currently unconnected, the issue is not infrastructure (but other factors such as affordability, relevance, or readiness). Finally, populations in those countries connect largely using mobile broadband (i.e., in Southeast Asia 75% of the population only use cellphone to access the Internet), so I think that fixed-broadband will have a limited impact in those places. (Maybe they can get a higher share of the cellphone tower backhauling market, but it will depend on the price per Mbps/month they can offer to MNOs).
Low Earth orbit constellations have both lower latency (a couple hundred miles for data to travel instead of tens of thousands) and dramatically more (and cheaper) satellites = more bandwidth available.
Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit. If you have a source that says otherwise, please post it here.
> Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit.
I'm not clear on whether you're referring to the ground station, the satellite constellation, or the cost of service here.
That said, industry laughed at the idea of reusable rockets, and Blackberry thought Steve Jobs faked the iPhone pre-release. Industry estimates have been known to be badly wrong.
SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.
http://www.mit.edu/~portillo/files/Comparison-LEO-IAC-2018-s...
Even if it winds up being more expensive, you might see a neighborhood getting an antenna and distributing it to a group of houses.
> SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.
Based on guesses made prior to the first launch of production hardware, and speculative guesses on the number of SpaceX ground stations? Your slides are from 1 October 2018. The first batch of production hardware went up 24 May 2019.
If anything, they're worse than those calculations since there's no ISL, and there were reported propulsion system problems.
I personally can't see a neighborhood going in on satellite internet since they still need to transmit between each other, which would mean more equipment.
I can say that the mass and volume of the satellites has changed quite a lot, and therefore the number of rocket launches required is pretty off in the paper. But I have not seen much info to invalidate the rest of results.
I am not sure how much heavier will the satellites be when they integrate the ISLs (if they do), but I believe that in any case they will be under 330 kg.
Latency absolutely matters for "high speed internet". Once you have reasonable bandwidth, that's the dominant factor in the user experience.
Please see this blog for approximate cost estimates, or the MIT study comparing leo constellations.
The blog you're citing claimed Starlink was getting canceled a year ago, so I'm a bit skeptical of its use as an oracle.
http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2018/09/18/420000-km-funding-s...
> Another hint that Starlink is going away was the statement that BFR is expected to consume the majority of engineering resources after the commercial crew development has been completed for NASA next year, despite Starlink supposedly costing more to develop than BFR ($10B+ compared to ~$5B) over the next 5 years.
TMF is probably the most accurate consultant in this industry if you read the whole blog. He tends to be opinionated, which you won't find on places like spacenews.
Either way, it's not productive arguing. It's like the Tesla versus anti-tesla camp, and that certainly won't be settled anytime soon.
NSR estimates for SpaceX are higher than what SpaceX claims (Gwynne Shotwell just claimed some Morgan Stanley estimates of $1M launch + $1M to be way off [1]), but still, I wouldn't expect them to be able to launch the 4,409 satellites of their intial design for less than $10B. And it's not clear that they will be able to raise such amount of money without a clear path towards profitability.
I agree with the shaklee3, Tim's blog is very legit. As full disclosure, I am the first author of the MIT study he mentioned, and the more I look into LEO mega-constellations, the more skeptical I become.
[1] https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/11877454453611806...
http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2019/12/12/reality-and-hype-in...