[Starlink] SpaceX ordered to explain pricing strategy

[Mike Puchol]

The frequency re-use is a factor of steering angle. Take these two spot beams, and the cells that they cover. The left side is a beam almost at nadir, the right side is close to maximum steering angle. Any hexagonal cell inside the beam’s footprint cannot be covered by another beam (from same or other satellite), as the overlap would violate the restrictions on Starlink’s license:



The hex cells are Uber’s H3, so while close to Starlink’s not the same - for the purpose of illustrating the issue, they are good enough. The spot beam size and shape is 100% accurate, as it is taken from the FCC filings - here is the representation of four different steering angles:



It is obvious that the higher the constellation density, the more tight spot beams you have available, increasing re-use considerably. A bonus advantage is you have way less chances of obstructions if you are using satellites almost directly overhead.

Best,

Mike
On Apr 12, 2022, 22:39 +0200, Jeremy Austin <jeremy at aterlo.com>, wrote:
>
>
> > On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 5:56 PM David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> > > Musk has said that without Starship and the v2 starlink satellites, the finances
> > > barely work, but Starship will significantly decrease the per-satellite costs,
> > > and the v2 satellites will increase the bandwith available per sq km, and the
> > > increase in the number of satellites from ~5k to ~40k will increase the number
> > > of satellites and therefor the bandwith per sq km again.
> >
> > Curiously, Starlink so far is not licensed for frequency reuse, which makes me quite curious how an 8x increase in satellites will result in a similar increase of bandwidth per square km.
> >
> > >
> > > Also, that 25Mb/s bandwidth figure is what happens in the peak hour that
> > > everyone is using the system. If that does not suffer from bad bloat, that's
> > > actually a fairly comfortable rate, enough for several people to be streaming HD
> > > video (although for 4k video it gets tighter, but still works) When my
> > > cablemodem drops out and I fall back to 8/1 DSL, my zoom calls notice when I
> > > have other people streaming video (along with email/etc), but I'm still usually
> > > not the worst on the call. 3x that bandwidth (unbloated) would be quite
> > > comfortable for several people.
>
> Completely agree about 25 Mbps being comfortable when latency is good. We (at Preseem) have a lot of data on how much bandwidth is used per nominal speed plan, and while the initial increase is steep (a 10 Mbit user is often constrained these days), above 25-50 Mbps, the slope is about 2:1 -- that is, a 200 Mbit user causes only about 2x the load of a 50 Mbit user.
>
>
> --
> --
> Jeremy Austin
> Sr. Product Manager
> Preseem | Aterlo Networks
> preseem.com
>
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