It’s not going to work inside buildings, and they would need to charge you a fairly astronomical fee per minute.
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.
But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.
Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.
So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.
> Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station
all mesh topologies
The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.
Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.
It takes a day at most if you want a simple setup.
keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense