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Comment by kisstheblade | Hacker News Reader

Does this make starlink any more feasible? I thought that the math just doesn't work out. Not to mention the massive amount of space garbage (40k satellites replaced every 5 years?) See for example a "busted" video https://youtu.be/zaUCDZ9d09Y?t=912

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I doubt it. At this price basically the only customers are in rural US and CA. And, by definition, this is not very many people.

It only just showed up for CA (in 2021) and mostly only along the border (eg Victoria). Granted a lot of population is lower.. but current ETAs (from the starlink "Order" page) for the 5 biggest cities are all tbd:

  - Montreal late 2022 (4.2M people)
  - Vancouver late 2022 (2.6M people)
  - Toronto 2022-2023 (6.2M people)
  - Calgary 2022-2023 (1.6M people)
  - Edmonton late 2023 (1.4M people)

There is no way that getting a satellite connection inside a city is cheaper or more practical than a physical line though. It will be necessarily slower, have worse latency and be more expensive.

I didn't say it was? I just used cities (major population centers) to determine what coverage was like (bad) and how much of the country had access (almost none).

My reaction was with regards to the parent’s question, sorry if it came out as flippant.

If those are indeed the planned locations for expansion then it’s even worse for Starlink because nobody over there needs it.

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