Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space. This drastically reduces the latency of long distance connections. We're talking NY round trip to Japan in the same time it takes NY roundtrip to the UK now.
The cost of backhaul and ongoing maintenance of cables is a lot more than SpaceX launching their own satellites by an entire order of magnitude.
You're talking latency not bandwidth. There is only so much spectrum to go around.
My understanding is that there is only a certain amount of bandwidth to go around and there are diminishing returns on adding people beyond a set capacity. I am not arguing that fiber is faster, I'm arguing that fiber has is cheaper at the bandwidth/cost in more dense areas. I don't believe we will see satellite based communication in cities (at a large % of population) for a long time.
Now I'm willing to believe someone who's worked closer to this than I have and to learn, but I've done enough in the satellite industry to not take what you're saying without seeing more evidence.
Besides the whole digging and laying cable costs, last mile work is expensive. You have to employ huge crews. Construction crews constantly dig up & cut your infrastructure "by accident" and the cost of recovering the fines from them is as much as the fines pay out. Having to send an emergency crew of three guys out for 18 hours of work to re-splice a 72-ct fiber every other weekend adds up. That doesn't happen in space.
What do you mean there?
If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work. They have salaries and they make (lots of) overtime pay. At a lot of the smaller companies (like the one I worked at) they have pensions. We had a lot of guys who started with the company out of high school, retired at 20 years, came back as contractors for a year and then did another 20 years and got a second pension from the same company...
And a couple of those guys are still contracting after their two pensions.
The push I'm discussing is the cost to get a baseline internet out there for 10k people per 100 miles.
I'm assuming the cost per last mile is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. If that's true right now the majority of our population is in cities so SpaceX will have trouble reaching them.
That's the core of my point. For Starlink to hit everyone in a city they'd have a huge amount of wasted capacity in rural areas.
Satellites also degrade naturally over time. They have a set lifetime and don't all last that long. Cables under the ground tend to last longer even if they require spot fixes. I'm assuming that bandwidth wise, the cables are more efficient at least until getting manufactured equipment to space becomes even more cheaper.
They're completely capable of adding capacity like that and having a high satellite count.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have a cost, but they have no middleman. They don't need to buy space on somebody else's rocket. They also don't have to pay any ongoing maintenance cost beyond equipment replacement and it's much cheaper than doing it on land. I know that you have satellite experience but their launch costs are a fraction of what other companies have done till now.
I worked for a suburban, regional ILEC and our operating costs were around 100 million a year to cover like two counties of maybe 100k customers and the local businesses.
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I actually do agree with you about costs delivering in dense markets as providing locally has certain "economy of scale" benefits. It's also not going to compete on the "Gigabit in every home" front, because I do agree that the bandwidth is more limited. Operating a local provider in general though is extremely expensive and doesn't really provide any additional benefit to the provider. SpaceX themselves have uses for this network. I also hope that I'm right here :)
We'll have to agree to disagree. Honestly, I hope you're correct and I'm wrong. I think ground based infrastructure is still going to be much cheaper at medium to high population densities. You don't agree with me, but I learned a lot in this back and forth. Thanks.
SpaceX isn't doing the installation work. They're not hiring the fleet of techs to do the work.
Let's keep it on-topic.
> SpaceX isn't doing the install work work on these Starlink kits. They just sell you some hardware. If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work
This is not true. SpaceX is absolutely going to be doing most of the installs through independent contractors. The original post implied they just ship you the antenna and the end user can set it up, which is wrong.
"You are responsible for installing the Starlink Kit. Do not allow third parties, or those not associated with SpaceX, to access or install the Starlink Kit unless you obtain approval from SpaceX," Starlink says.
"Do not install the Starlink Kit at your home if you do not have the authority to do so. It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with all applicable zoning, ordinances, covenants, conditions, restrictions, lease obligations and landlord/owner approvals related to the installation location."
SpaceX is not doing any of these installs themselves or through contractors. They've been very up front about this and how it's not just going to be for the beta program.
Keep up the FUD though.
It's a phased array antenna -- it's really simple to install. People are already doing this themselves on top of RVs and work trucks. It has motors that are self-adjusting. Their instructions are "1) plug in socket, 2) point at sky."
Please show me where they've been up front that after the beta it will continue to do this. Also remember that almost everything Elon has said about starlink has turned out to not be accurate or delayed.
I've been pegged at 1000% excitement since I first found out about this project a year ago. This is the best thing to happen to this service industry since probably ISDN.
Your packets will go up to the satellite, immediately down again to the next ground station and from there to the destination through the normal fiber backbone.
The what?
As far as I know c is a constant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index#:~:text=The%2....
https://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/how-to-slow-trap-...
This will always end up being slower than a plane wave in the same material, usually only somewhere between 10%-90% (and this also depends on the wavelength) of the free-space group velocity.