Right now, Starlink have reached capacity in quite a number of places.

The availability map on Starlink's home page shows that Starlink is "sold out" in many places, including London, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento (California), Edmonton, San Diego, Austin (Texas), Mexico City, Guadalajara, Brisbane, Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare, and many more:

https://www.starlink.com/us/map

This isn't surprising given the fact that Dishys to date only use Ku-band, there's only 2 GHz of it for user downlink, and you can't use the same beam frequency in adjacent cells. 

SpaceX have a modification application before the FCC that, if successful, would allow them to:

• Up power flux density on the ground. This'd allow satellites to transmit with higher power. Note that none of the current beam transmitters on the satellites have sufficient EIRP to hit the current PFD limits across the entire Ku-band. But the Gen. 2 ones are supposedly only by a factor of about 2.7 off, so with Starship able to carry heavier sats, there might be room for a bit of growth. 
  
• Use satellites down to 20 deg above the horizon instead of the current 25 deg (this mightn't look like much, but if my calculations aren't wrong, means that they'd see about 43% more of the orbital sphere with that increase alone).

SpaceX have tried for a long time to get into lower orbital height shells. This makes sense from their perspective: Each satellite's beam footprint becomes smaller, which makes frequency re-use easier. Path loss decreases, and a ground station sees a smaller fraction of satellites in that shell, so they can argue that since the ground now sees transmissions from fewer satellites, EPFD limits are less critical, which allows them to up power. Makes for a couple of bits more per symbol perhaps. Latency goes down a little, too, and they now have the numbers in terms of satellites, so it doesn't matter so much that these shells need a larger number of sats to work.

Now there are drawbacks also: The lower the orbits go, the more residual atmospheric drag there will be, and this expresses itself in either shorter sat lifespan or the need to carry more fuel, which either means they'll need to launch at a faster rate or with fewer sats per launch. It's also a bit more crowded in lower space, as this is where a lot of earth observation spacecraft sit (if you want to take detailed pics of the Earth's surface, you want it to be as close to your camera lens as you can have it), and some of those aren't there for open source public good science.

To me, the additional speeds don't matter all that much.

I am presently in gale force winds, my boat rocking, and my latency
stable, and only about 50mbit down:
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=a14b4467-16d7-4b6e-8736-1593813d6eda

Maybe a little less packet loss would help, as my last (hour long)
videoconference broke up twice, and bbr is seriously outperforming
cubic. In addition for aiming for higher speeds, improving density and
reliability would be nice, but otherwise I am a pretty happy camper
with the service I have, compared to 5g.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 2:16 PM Hesham ElBakoury via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

https://cordcuttersnews.com/starlink-internet-speeds-could-skyrocket-to-2-gigabits-per-second-spacex-president-says/
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-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz 
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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