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The constellation is designed to be cycled out, so they'll continually be launching more and/or newer satellites over time. The next generation ones will likely be able to support more bandwidth.

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It already has started doing so. The OP's 20Gibps number comes from the 2016 FCC filing which has 10Gibps full duplex. An Elon tweet now says 50Gibps half duplex.

All good stuff but you can only reuse the spectrum marginally from LEO even with the sharpest directional pattern spot beams. With physical transmission line you get the entire spectrum for every single run.

Just curious, why not for LEO? If Echostar can draw patterns like this from geosync, shouldn't the same be possible with an LEO? Or are the satellites spinning/bouncing around too much?

https://rvseniormoments.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/07_ka-ba...

For GEO it's even worse. Those are very large shared "spot" beams in the echostar ka band image. From LEO starlink sats can do down to ~15km radius.

Yup, Starlink will be crappy in suburban and urban areas, too many people to share a satellite with.

Starlink isn't for people who hate their Big3 ISP. It's for people who wish they had a Big3 ISP to hate.

I wonder whether we'll see the day when the satellites themselves can contain say, Netflix/Amazon/Disney cache servers to cut down on back haul traffic?

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