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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

If the price is 5 times cheaper though... what then?

There is a set capacity for these satellites, they can accomodate X number of users per satellite which would be a region (I'm making an educated guess) about the size of New Jersey. I think the size is larger than that which means fewer users but I'm trying to ballpark during my lunch break.

So if they expect to have 10,000 users (again ballpark) in New Jersey, but they instead get 40,000 they'll increase their costs. If they get 1000 users in say Wyoming, then maybe the costs in Wyoming will be lower.

The issue is they have a world wide capacity of 10,000 users at 11 MBs over the size of New Jersey. Again, I haven't run these numbers but these are the kinds of calculations GEO sats make to set prices for say, airplanes traveling from US -> Europe. The difference is that GEO targets specific areas more rather than blanketing the entire earth due to them being stationary.

The benefit of Starlink is that it'll have approximately equal signal all over the earth. So if you're in a city it can cover the same number of people per mile as it can in the middle of the ocean.

I believe the satellites are moving, so there's no "Wyoming satellite customers" in the same way as existing satellite internet. The Wyoming customers will be sharing satellites with several other places as they move in and out of their regions

The constellation is moving but they are moving in a formation. Meaning you have a rotation of 2-4 satellites above your head at any give time. Each satellite can service a radius the size of Wyoming.

So you have a limit on the number of satellites and the number of customers per satellite.

The article says 5 million in the USA. That makes sense given what I'm thinking. That's about 100,000 per state, but it's not going to work like that. It's a good ballpark for the service they'll provide.

My main point, is if it's 100K per (1/50th the US) there will be less bandwidth in cities than in rural regions.

This is a HUGE boon to rural areas and will be amazing.

This will probably not affect you if you are urban or even suburban.

Their current plans talk about a constellation of 40,000 says.

While there is limit to number of connections per sat that applies to any routing equipment really, there is not much limit to how many sats can be there .

Sure spectrum is limited today ,however if 5million people use it already, other spectrum could be freed up for this purpose , if there is demand .

The constellation today is not ready for high density usage , it is not that it will never be ready .

This type of constellation won't be able to do it.

They are planning on picking off the users who cable has to run the furthest to off of the ISPs not the close users. If we started spreading out evenly I could see this, but while we've got the population density we do, I don't see this happening.

Each house will interfere with it's neighbor, the more they spread the easier it is.

>The constellation today is not ready for high density usage , it is not that it will never be ready .

I am no sith, I shouldn't speak in absolutes. But, I'd bet that this technology won't disrupt ISPs within 50 miles of a city. I hope it would, but I don't see that happening.

That's not how it works. The FCC doesn't just free up massive spectrum from other places. We're talking about 500MHz chunks that just don't exist. The FCC favors cell technologies, so if anything, they would take it away from them.

Nothing would stop them from tracking access based on location.

The bandwidth calculations work out about the same, as the users are pretty much stationary - users will be in an area handled by ~one satellite at a time (with handover between satellites).

What you said at the end is not true. It does not have a relatively uniform signal at all areas of the earth (on purpose, since they know where the customers are), and it's not a benefit to be standing capacity where nobody lives.

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