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Comment by vasilia | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. If you are living near base station in a big city it will work. But in the countryside where no good connection from ISP equipment to the base station the bottleneck will be this link. Furthermore, 5G uses a higher frequency than LTE, it could be not cost-effective to cover remote regions with small number of users. Starlink could solve problems with cables, but adds problems with RTT. Maybe one day all FAANG companies will open data centres on Earth orbit.

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> Maybe one day all FAANG companies will open data centres on Earth orbit.

I know you are joking, but the weight, power, and heat dissipation all make this impractical. They tried similar ideas with cargo containers and underwater enclosures, which were a lot more practical than outer space, but they didn't stick with it.

I think the main problem is spare parts. A long time ago I was working in the data centre. I don't remember any day when there was no problems with hardware.

Starlink has comparable RTT to many physical paths if you’re not living right next to a data center. They are only 500km altitude.

As I know 1200km.

What problems with RTT does Starlink add?

The signal goes through the ionosphere to the satellite than to another satellite which has a link to the Earth. Starlink uses LEO, so there is 2400 km link(1200 km from/to the ground). 1 ms is time for the signal to travel for 300 km in a vacuum. So theoretically the lowest RTT could be about 8 ms. Right now RTT to my ISP is 2 ms.

I think your altitude figure is off by ~2x. "The satellites successfully reached their operational altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers)" according to this: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

I found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_co... It's pretty good for far remote regions like Alaska. Fibre channel will be much more costly with comparable RTT.

Neat, thanks!

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