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Comment by nuker | Hacker News Reader

Whats one satellite bandwidth? If a sat flies over a city with, say, 100k subscribers, and 10% is watching 4k video on Netflix? There gonna be limits, right?

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> If a sat flies over a city

"Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.

"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

Essentially, it's not aimed at people that live in cities and have access to other alternatives.

Other than the cool factor I’m not sure why you’d want it in a city. I get gigabit for 60$ a month and star link will never match the latency I get due to physics. If it was cheap enough I’d love to get it for traveling but it should be used for things like that not to replace your inner city connection.

Depends on where in the city. If I were closer to the city, I could probably get something better from Comcast, but CenturyLink bonded vdsl2 is 80Mbps down/10Mbps up, 20 ms round trip to PPPoE concentrator, $60ish/month. Starlink seems to have maybe better upload and comparable download and latency, and won't go down when the DSLAM (or whatever it's called for vdsl) loses utility power, like my centurylink service does or 2-4 hours later like the cell towers do.

Backup internet.

I live in a remote, medium-sized city and need an internet link that constantly works. Comcast usually fills that need, but there are occasional outages. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T's fixed internet offerings are not available where I am.

Starlink is what I've been waiting for :)

> it's not aimed at people that live in cities

People are, u know, people. They will defy the "not designed for you" clause. Still, is there a number for one sat bandwidth?

Around 20 Gbps per sat or 1 Tbps every launch (60 sats).

Are people going to pay a $500 equipment cost upfront and then $99 a month if they have alternatives?

For me in my big city i can get 360mb down unlimited lines for the equivalent of around $50 per month.

Anyone choosing the Starlink option in that scenario probably shouldn't have financial independence in the first place.

I’d keep in mind that some people really, really hate Comcast/AT&T/CenturyLink/etc from the years of abuse they’ve meted out. They might be willing to pay a substantial premium to not have to deal with them/contribute to their bottom line anymore.

> Anyone choosing the Starlink option in that scenario probably shouldn't have financial independence in the first place.

I know, rich bastards, right?

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