Not so fast! :-)

It's one thing to extend LEO coverage to new regions, especially rural and remote ones, but quite another to do so economically and at scale. For an urban user on fibre, Starlink's performance is anything but a game changer: lower data rates, more latency (even without jitter - and there's plenty thereof on Starlink, especially as Dishy switches between differently loaded satellites) and significantly higher cost. Plus: If you're on fibre, the equipment at the end of it determines how fast it can go, and we're now seeing 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s services to consumers being offered in a lot of areas under the "hyperfibre" tag. It's foreseeable that as demand grows with IoT, high definition video etc., this will scale up further as we go. There's really no serious hurdle to stop it.

With anything that needs to use the radio spectrum, the limited capacity thereof is the main hurdle. Sure, you can put more satellites in orbit, but without narrower beams this will not allow more frequency re-use. You can give them larger phased arrays to have narrower beams, but these won't give you the order of magnitude of improvement you need in order to serve the unconnected. You can give the satellites more solar power and hence more lasers, on-board processing capacity and downlink power, but that works against frequency re-usability to a good extent.

Remember how cellphone networks evolve: You start with a few towers in high spots using high power to get wide area coverage while you have few users. At this point (which corresponds largely to where Starlink is at now), spectrum isn't much of an issue (and even that is only partially true for Starlink - see Mike's excellent article on this: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f501). As your user base grows, you move off the hills into the valleys and lower your power so your cells become smaller and shielded from each others, because now, frequency re-use is the name of the game. You use beamforming off phased arrays in order to further separate users.

So what we are seeing now is Starlink as the new kid on the block turning up with what are in analogy effectively cell towers high in the sky. Their current user base is maybe at 1/1000th (ballpark) of potential demand before growth. Population growth on this planet alone adds a lot more potential users a day than Starlink does. So what options does Starlink have to scale? Unlike a terrestrial network operator, Starlink can't really come down all that far from their "space hills" without burning their satellites up in the atmosphere more quickly. "Space hills" also consist of vacuum only, which unlike earthly hills can't separate base stations by blocking signal. The distance from/to space also requires vastly larger phased array antennas for the same spot beam coverage area contour on the ground. It also places limits on transmit EIRP both ways. Larger antennas and solar arrays constrain the number of satellites that can be launched at a time, making constellation building and replacement harder.

It's a joy to see people in some remote places finally getting Internet connectivity via Starlink that somewhat resembles what most of the rest of us get. But even now, we see Starlink quite obviously dealing with capacity issues: See my recent post on the "strange" differential hardware pricing in NZ (you pay over 250% extra for Dishy now if you live in a big city here), or their exorbitant pricing for maritime service at over 10x the rate for a fixed location connection. Or the (not so) strange lack of availability in the eastern US, along with many spots scattered around the planet in medium-density rural areas. Is this what a network looks like that will be able to grow service capacity by a factor of a 1000 or more in the next decade?

The good news: Growth by a factor of 5 or 10 might get most smaller Pacific islands covered, which is dear to my heart, but affordability will still leave us with a digital divide there. But it's not going to get Internet to the two billion un- and underconnected in Asia, and their peers elsewhere.

One of the three big telcos here (One NZ, until recently known as Vodafone) announced last week that they were partnering with Starlink to increase mobile coverage from some time next year, from the existing 98% to 100% of the country. I promptly got called for media comment again, and of course what people read into the announcement was that we'd all be able to throw out our existing wired Internet connections and Dishys and could use our mobile phones instead. So I tried hard to point out the fine print - that it's going to be text and fairly low quality voice only, and perhaps some low bandwidth data services such as e-mail or messenger apps. That it won't work indoors or from inside vehicles. That it was only for the 2% of locations that got no signal at all so far. That it wasn't going to bring Netflix to the wap-waps. But that it was going to be great for trampers (hikers in local lingo) who needed to let their pick-up service know if things changed.

The question I got back was whether it was going to put community-based wireless ISPs out of business? Um, no.

6/04/2023 8:09 am, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:

I stumbled across this because he cited me, but it is very thoughtful
and interesting, otherwise.

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/03/31/everything-everywhere-all-the-time/

I really do think we are on the verge of being able to cover the rest
of the world with internet, through LEO technologies.

--
AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
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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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