Hacker News Reader

Comment by invalidopcode | Hacker News Reader

Not pointless, that's the best use of Starlink with phones. Base station backhaul gets the benefits of not having to run fiber + space for a bigger antenna w/ better signal to noise ratio

View on HN

SNR is not a function of antenna size. The size is dictated by the wavelength, not how desperate you are to receive a signal.

Directionality does make an antenna larger as it usually involves reflectors and directors, the size and placement of which is also a fraction of the wavelength, but if they are actually able to do direct to phone with decent reception and arbitrary coverage, then that beats having to set up base stations to cover a small circle even if you get 10-15 dB better SNR.

This might give you LTE in, say, all of the Australian outback, all of Alaska, along the Andes mountain range, etc.

I don’t think availability of fiber is the bottleneck here.

I think the problem with fiber in general is not availability, but deployment cost. You need to dig and bury the fiber. That's expensive.

You could mount it on poles.

For remote areas that might still be tens to hundreds of kilometers of poles and fiber just to add coverage to one remote area. Then you move on to the next.

No one wants to do that across all of Alaska or the Australian outback.

We have cellular issues in upstate NY that has plenty of infrastructure. Dark fiber is also practically everywhere

Sure, but there's also cellular issues in the Australian outback and most of Alaska, and there you don't have infrastructure.

You need power as well as fiber.

The deployment cost is even lower when you don’t need to put a tower on the ground, which is the point of this. They can cover the entire U.S. to eliminate coverage gaps using the starlink satellites.

It is outside of cities.

In the sense "you can buy fiber cheaply by the ton", not. But in the sense "laying down fiber in the mountains of Papua-New Guinea, or in the Canadian Arctic, or a simmering warzone full of militias", that is indeed a major bottleneck.

So, location-dependent.

It's absolutely the bottleneck in some remote areas, and satellite backhaul for terrestrial mobile networks has been a thing before Starlink, as far as I know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com