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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

The key thing here is it allows for very high bandwidth to go almost anywhere on earth, not just spots where it's easy to land a cable. Starlink's already demonstrated how great that is for consumer bandwidth (50Mbps); a multi-gigabit link terminated at a satellite is fantastic.

The part that impresses me most is they're talking about LEO satellites. Those move fast! Starlink does this with a very impressive phased array antenna design. Conceptually tracking a moving satellite with a laser is as easy as rotating a mirror, not sure how hard it is in practice.

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It also circumvents the biggest problem with fiber, politics. Starlink doesn’t need permission to run a backbone across (or rather over) a country. This will be revolutionary for people in Africa, South America, and huge swaths of Asia/Australia where a few telecom monopolies have artificially jacked the price of transit.

IIUC, it only circumvents politics due to existing treaties. Those old treaties are likely ripe for revision with the extensive commercialization and the increasing number of countries capable of launching payloads into space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_outer_space

It definitely helps mitigate the infrastructure buildout hurdles (which are not small), but they would still need to jump through any "I need to do business in this country" regulations, etc.

Only if they want to bring a signal down to the ground. Unlike fiber, LEO sats can send data across an entire continent of countries or states without getting permission from any of them. Wanna connect Toronto to Mexico City with fiber, gotta get the US and half a dozen states and dozens of counties all to give you easement. Not so with space lasers :-)

> how great that is for consumer bandwidth (50Mbps)

50 Mbps is great consumer bandwidth where?

Almost everywhere in Germany.

Rural Canada. On a lake shore. 30km from one of Canada's "Top 50" cities.

Where I used to live, I had 2 options for internet access. A Wireless ISP that uses a parabolic antenna pointed at a water-tower about ~20km from my home; or a cell-phone based internet connection.

The WISP allowed me on average 300kb/s transmissions. The Cell-Phone allowed me between 1.5Mb/s and 7Mb/s (to a max use of 5GB/month).

So 50Mb/s is an incredible upgrade.

Sounds like your WISP isn't investing in the new generation of massive MIMO radios made by companies like Cambium.

In most places where you can't economically get a fiber. That is, in most places outside dense urban cores. They are petty numerous in the US.

Laugh from rural area via fiber

most places in North America outside dense urban cores*

But sure let's fill up space with junk because North America can't get their shit together and just deploy fiber.

Sadly, in most of the rural US. My other options are 12Mbps fixed wireless, 1-100Mbps cellular, or 3Mbps DSL which AT&T stopped selling in violation of various government contracts.

Starlink in practice is 10-200Mbps. Here's their specifications: https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1138-34130-60

An actual 50 Mbps link is perfectly good for most use cases, you can stream anything and it is not really a bottleneck in determining how quickly pages load. Large file transfers may still take appreciable time, but it is rarely a big issue.

An advertised "50 Mbps" mobile connection is dog food if you are used to 50 Mbps fiber. You are lucky if you get 20 Mbps through, though it can be much less. Worst part is all the packet loss that cause inconsistent latency and speed.

I'm on 50mbps and 99% of the time it's too fast for my needs. I've lived on 10mbps capped 4g for a month and I didn't notice any problems either

Anything that allows video communication/streaming is "great" imho, it certainly is more than enough for most people.

Here where I've been on 1.5 Mbps for 15 years and there is literally no other alternative. No cell coverage. No cable. Mountain blocks GEOsat. Copper is a 6 mile run to nearest town so DSL is out too. Also, I'm literally 12 miles from the Googleplex. Yeah, broadband is a mess outside of cities and suburbs.

all of rural America....

In practice, considerable difficulty. Like you said LEO moves fast. You are talking 10 min in line of sight (LOS) depending on the orbit. So the handoff algorithms (and necessary network) are very challenging and cost prohibitive. I mention it in my earlier response but if you have a LEO network you need pretty substantial arrays to accommodate such a power load, and during “night” for whoever is using the network, you need transfer mechanisms to relay the data, using even more power during eclipse. This is a real challenge.

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