It's fine, but it's highly dependent on having extremely low customer density. The system doesn't work well if everyone is using it all the time.
What is your extremely low customer density source? In theory they could reduce beam size and throw more satellites in space. How much they can handle is up for speculation, but your “extremely low” claim could use a source.
Wired networks can include fibre optic to the house like we have in Australia where the speeds can reach a consistent 1Gbps even in highly dense areas at peak times. And internal testing is happening on 10Gbps.
If US cares about supporting the internet of tomorrow satellite services like Starlink will never be capable enough.
Cheaper fiber to homes definitely made last mile scale better bandwidth-wise, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of needing to heavily oversubscribe to make it affordable.
So they don't need to have equivalent transit capacity.
Which is not a capability Starlink can provide.
Fiber to your home doesn't mean you've got dedicated bandwidth to your ISP. You're still usually on a shared medium. You're likely to get all your speed most of the time though because most residential customers aren't constantly using anywhere near a gigabit of throughput constantly.
That said though, a regular ISP can just run another line out. Starlink can't just will additional useful frequency ranges out of nothing. There's only so much spectrum to be used in the giant shared medium of the sky. Beams are only going to be so tight at those distances (outside of using lasers), only so many useful orbits, etc.
Youtube meets you at exchange points and if you’re an ISP anywhere that isn’t a major city, there isn’t an exchange point there.
Take a place like Boise and a municipal fiber provider there. They aren’t big enough for Netflix to offer an OCA and there isn’t an exchange in Boise with good content provider density on the fabric. So that provider needs to pay for transit or a private lease to the nearest big exchange (SEA, PDX, barely SLC) where it can get connectivity.
Your mental model is completely wrong for ISPs that aren’t serving the same city as one of the <10 major exchanges in the US.
It's just the nature of the technology.
That’s… very incorrect.
When an ISP runs fiber to a new building (be it in a business park or rural farm), the math is almost entirely based on recuperating their installation costs - which they often pay for entirely out of their pocket. Your entire first contract term is usually just paying back the installation costs alone...
For some perspective, at a previous building we tried to bring fiber across the street into our office. The installation costs were too expensive to make the math work - so the ISP offered to split the installation costs 50/50 instead. Our half was over $94,000. This involved directional boring and the works, to go ~200ft to the right-of-way vault and into our MPOE.
One can only imagine the expense of running fiber (or any type of cable) out to the boonies. It's totally feasible - but the costs make it not palatable in reality.
Running a fibre is about the same cost as running a power cable.
There is a lot of infrastructure where the cost to replace is an order of magnitude higher than the inflation adjusted original cost.
No free lunch, as they say.
Source : https://internet.buildns.ca
> having extremely low customer density
I think you need to define “extremely low” because 700gbps is plenty for several thousand people. And the question was specifically about everyone in rural areas switching.
If you go by rural being <1000 people per square mile and a cell covering roughly 97 square miles (assuming the larger 15 mile hex diameter), that lands at 7.2 mbps per person if there are 1000 people in every square mile all trying to use it at the same time.
That sounds fine considering standard consumer usage patterns mean you’ll get 10x that as an individual even in peak times. That’s also assuming maximum density for what’s considered rural.
Which is ridiculously poor.
This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.
Not sure what you mean? The more remote you get the better your bandwidth gets because you are sharing it with fewer people. This is the opposite of most ISPs which tend to ignore rural areas.
At a typical residential contention of 50:1 that's 350mbit
At a really good residential rate of 10:1 that's still 70mbit
My personal experience, as someone who has lived in, and worked from, rural areas with limited bandwidth, is that latency (for SSH connections) is the only thing that matters for learning and productivity.
But OP clearly knows better, because if we just gave everyone gigabit fiber, the access to UHD Pornhub, Netflix, Amazon Video, etc, will instantly correct the "digital divide". And OP has a point. I know someone who started designing > 500k qubit quantum computers with > 5s coherence after spending two weeks straight watching all seasons of My 600Lb Life.
He kept mumbling something about "It's not in the box, it's in the band"
There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.
Readers, I would take posts from this user with a large grain of salt.
The bandwidth is not split between upload and download, it’s very explicitly optimized for download capacity which is what most people are interested in. If you want to upload much beyond 15mbps, Starlink is going to suck for you regardless of congestion.
>There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.
High density areas are broken into smaller cells to help with this. don’t forget that the limit doesn’t apply to roaming users either.
Sure, 7mbps may not be good enough to supply the demands of your multi-screen 4k UHD loli goon cave, but it's more than enough to send a < 1kB message to your family that you're safe in a disaster area.
Try to get some perspective.
That’s HD video. The alternative for these people is even slower DSL or heavily throttled LTE tethering if they are lucky enough to have cell coverage. You’re living in a privileged bubble.
I don't believe there is a theoretical or practical upper limit which would exclude very wide adoption of Starlink and similar competitors.
Put in another way, I think it is possible that in a decade or two the only cell phone/data service that doesn't come from orbit will be a few terrestrial towers in dense downtown urban areas and around things like sports venues.
With satellite internet you're sharing the medium with everyone, and that doesn't scale well. Beamforming probably helps a lot, but I don't how accurate it can be on that distance.
Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic network is done.
As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.
Which gets back to my original point where increasing the maximum density inherently reduces the average utilization of each satellite. There simply aren’t enough people living in Iowa etc to balance the east coast.
It’s actually less than you expect because you can make use of satellites a hundred miles out to the sea, over the Hudson River, and even suburbs. And that’s before considering how few people would pick Starlink when they can use cheap fiber.
>And that’s before considering how few people would pick Starlink when they can use cheap fiber.
Obviously we're talking about how dense an area Startlink can service on its own.
I’m going to simplify because you seem to misunderstand what’s going on.
Your eyes allow you to see a clear image of your surroundings because photons come from even slightly different angles aren’t interfering with each other. Starlink uses a phased array antenna to achieve a similar effect where satellites in different locations broadcasting on the same frequency can be clearly distinguished by two base stations physically next to each other. And similarly two different satellites can receive clear signals when two Starlink antennas are broadcasting when physically next to each other at the same instant.
There’s physical limits and the phased array antenna in use are much worse than theoretically possible. But, the technology they are currently using really does scale vastly beyond what’s economical viable.
>Starlink uses a phased array antenna to achieve a similar effect where satellites in different locations broadcasting on the same frequency can be clearly distinguished by two base stations physically next to each other
If by next to each other you mean several km apart, yes. edit: Ok, I didn't think of that, if the satellites are far away from each other it'll work indeed since it's both the sender and receiver which have directivity. That indeed would make it scale better.
Sure the technology can be improved, but there's only so much you can do at several hundreds of km distance and the sizes of antennas you have. Especially with mobile phones which are small and power limited I really don't see how it could work in anything but very low density areas.
> If by next to each other you mean several km apart, yes
By close I mean inches. Phased array’s aren’t great at directionality, but both the satellite and the receiver are using them which makes a real difference because the satellites are in different locations even if the receivers aren’t.
At the limit satellite A has a few spot beams one is aimed at say one World Trade Center which also covers several blocks around it. It’s 5 miles from satellite B which isn’t aiming at that location, but another satellite say G that’s 20km away is.
Hypothetically 2 ground stations X1 and X2 are 1 foot apart on the roof of one trade center. X1 can get a signal from satellite A at 25 DB higher than the signal from satellites G because there’s a few degree difference in incoming angle and 50DB higher than from B which is both a degree off and aiming elsewhere.
Similarly A receives a single from X1 that’s 25 DB higher than from X2 because their signals are aiming in different directions. (DB numbers were picked from a hat but I had a several variables already.)
The real world isn’t that simple, and there’s no way in hell their software is setup for that many satellites but phased array antenna on both side makes a big difference here.
It’s always worth remembering that efficiency and technical limitations are different things. We could absolutely blanket the US in 5G towers but the cost is vastly higher than the benefit.
Starlink could pretty easily serve everyone whose only current option is 4G/5G/DSL/Satellite.
Basically everywhere where there is no Fiber or Cable. That's still a decent chunk of the population.