Yes. The cell size is ~20 km

they can only narrow the radio beam so much (probably whatever their cell size is). They can't change the footprint without changing the antenna, so unless they have the beam move around in the cell, the footprint should be slightly larger than the cell size

sometimes there is a lot of data going to one station, but sometims it's only going to be a trival amount (think ack packets for a lot of uploads), so they can save airtime by using one timeslot to transmit to many stations at once.

David Lang

On Fri, 24 Feb 2023, Oleg Kutkov via Starlink wrote:

Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 01:47:05 +0200
From: Oleg Kutkov via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Reply-To: Oleg Kutkov <contact@olegkutkov.me>
To: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Starlink] System and method of providing a medium access control
     scheduler

Oh, that's interesting.

>> the satellite broadcasts the downlink radio frame to all the user terminals in a group and they each retrieve their respective data from the downlink radio frame

I thought the satellite beamformer only sends data frames to the appropriate UT. It looks like the given satellite covers the whole cell at one TX channel.
Otherwise, it would be too complex, I guess.

On 2/23/23 23:53, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:

For those of you that don't look at patents, don't look at:

https://patents.justia.com/patent/11540301

But I would welcome comment from those that do.

H/T virtuallynathan.

-- 
Best regards,
Oleg Kutkov