[Starlink] 69,000 Users

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 30 Jun 2021, David Lang wrote:

> I suspect that they will be more limited by the number of stations they 
> can build than the interest from customers. As user density increases, 
> they will need to launch more satellites, but as Starship comes online, 
> the cost to do so will drop significantly.

My opinion here is that it's a bw game. with 1M customers doing a few 
megabits/s each, that's significant amount of bw capacity needed. Even 
with tens of thousands of satellites (each significant cost to build and 
launch), I still don't really see how they'll handle many millions of 
customers.

Terrestrial mobile networks still haven't really come around to unlimited 
data that actually works, so we'll see how well Starlink can do this.

There was a power outage affecting around 50k households yesterday, I 
presume most peoples' residential connections/wifis stopped working, and 
they all went mobile. This rendered the local mobile networks basically 
unusable, people reported 10s RTT on some of the packets that were 
actually delivered.

5G base stations today are in the gigabits/s magnitude of total air 
capacity, even if they have similar for the satellites it's going to be 
problematic to keep up. I think they'll have to keep charging a premium 
price, higher than today, or implement data cap.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se