Not every country has the resources or desire to lay nation-wide fiber. Satellite internet could beneift millions of people who don't have access to reliable high-speed connections.
This is, in my opinion, kind of a myth. In the markets where the average revenue per user is high (Europe, USA, Canada, Australia) there is already (or there will be very shortly when Viasat3 is fully launched) high-speed reliable Internet connectivity through GEO satellites. And yes, the latency is huge and there are data-caps (which are pretty low if you want to binge-watch Netflix). But I am not sure that LEO constellations will be able to compete with GEO vHTS in price (not to mention the huge challenge of getting the price of the phase array user terminals cheap enough), so I am skeptical they will be able to capture a significant fraction of the market share.
In the rest of the world, the ARPU is so low that it's hard to have a viable business model for broadband satellite connectivity (for all orbits GEO, MEO, or LEO). Furthermore, 90% of the population is currently covered by 3G/4G networks, so I would argue that for most of the 3.5 billion people currently unconnected, the issue is not infrastructure (but other factors such as affordability, relevance, or readiness). Finally, populations in those countries connect largely using mobile broadband (i.e., in Southeast Asia 75% of the population only use cellphone to access the Internet), so I think that fixed-broadband will have a limited impact in those places. (Maybe they can get a higher share of the cellphone tower backhauling market, but it will depend on the price per Mbps/month they can offer to MNOs).
First starlink is better than fiber because it will have lower latency.
Second and more important it doesn't destroy astronomy at all, it adds some small temporary inconvenience for some types of observations, but at the same time makes space launches cheaper allowing more space telescopes, which is going to help astronomy greatly.
Your reaction would be totally justified if starlink was really disrupting astronomy, but it is simply not true.
It will only have lower latency when they have the inter-satellite links. Until then, they will have the latency of fiber PLUS the RTT from the user terminal - satellite - gateway path.
Satellite internet has indeed existed for decades, but via small numbers of geostationary satellites (Iridium only has 76 active satellites; Starlink launches about that many in every launch). That means severely constrained bandwidth, and high latency given the ~50,000 mile round trip the data has to take. It's also expensive to get a satellite out there.
Low Earth orbit constellations have both lower latency (a couple hundred miles for data to travel instead of tens of thousands) and dramatically more (and cheaper) satellites = more bandwidth available.
I'm well aware of the scale of starlink, but the speeds delivered by starlink won't be any faster than the existing GEO satellites at the time, not will it be cheaper. The OP talked about high speed internet, which, in most cases, the latency doesn't matter.
Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit. If you have a source that says otherwise, please post it here.
Iridium currently offers a handful of megabits at best, doesn't it? Starlink's loading 20 Gbps on each satellite, and has successfully tested up to 610 megabits on a connection with a military plane. (https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...)
> Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit.
I'm not clear on whether you're referring to the ground station, the satellite constellation, or the cost of service here.
That said, industry laughed at the idea of reusable rockets, and Blackberry thought Steve Jobs faked the iPhone pre-release. Industry estimates have been known to be badly wrong.
The ground system is what will make or break starlink. Every phased array antenna to date is at a price point that would put starlink selling exclusively to enterprise customers. This means consumers won't be able to get it unless you're in the 1% and living very remote.
SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.
Even if it winds up being more expensive, you might see a neighborhood getting an antenna and distributing it to a group of houses.
> SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.
Based on guesses made prior to the first launch of production hardware, and speculative guesses on the number of SpaceX ground stations? Your slides are from 1 October 2018. The first batch of production hardware went up 24 May 2019.
I am the author of the slides/paper. The analysis was done with the best data available at the time, but I am interested in knowing what parameters you think are off / have changed substantially since then.
I can say that the mass and volume of the satellites has changed quite a lot, and therefore the number of rocket launches required is pretty off in the paper. But I have not seen much info to invalidate the rest of results.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the mass estimates increased? either way, that should only affect how many that can launch at a given time. I didn't think that number had changed appreciably either.
In their original FCC filing, they were estimating 386 kg per satellite. The ones launched in May were 227 kg each, and those last month 260 kg (they added the Ka-band antennas).
I am not sure how much heavier will the satellites be when they integrate the ISLs (if they do), but I believe that in any case they will be under 330 kg.
These are not guesses. These are calculations based on FCC filings with things like EIRP, PFD, etc, all included. SpaceX cannot simply transmit hotter than they filed for just because the filing is old.
If anything, they're worse than those calculations since there's no ISL, and there were reported propulsion system problems.
I personally can't see a neighborhood going in on satellite internet since they still need to transmit between each other, which would mean more equipment.
NSR estimates for SpaceX are higher than what SpaceX claims (Gwynne Shotwell just claimed some Morgan Stanley estimates of $1M launch + $1M to be way off [1]), but still, I wouldn't expect them to be able to launch the 4,409 satellites of their intial design for less than $10B. And it's not clear that they will be able to raise such amount of money without a clear path towards profitability.
I agree with the shaklee3, Tim's blog is very legit. As full disclosure, I am the first author of the MIT study he mentioned, and the more I look into LEO mega-constellations, the more skeptical I become.
Streaming uses lots of bandwidth, but it's not necessarily the majority of browsing activity. High latency is painful if you're doing things like browsing Reddit.
The blog you're citing claimed Starlink was getting canceled a year ago, so I'm a bit skeptical of its use as an oracle.
> Another hint that Starlink is going away was the statement that BFR is expected to consume the majority of engineering resources after the commercial crew development has been completed for NASA next year, despite Starlink supposedly costing more to develop than BFR ($10B+ compared to ~$5B) over the next 5 years.
Browsing Reddit is perfectly fine on satellite internet. It's obviously not as fast as cable, but it's not the satellite internet of 10 years ago people judge it on.
TMF is probably the most accurate consultant in this industry if you read the whole blog. He tends to be opinionated, which you won't find on places like spacenews.
Either way, it's not productive arguing. It's like the Tesla versus anti-tesla camp, and that certainly won't be settled anytime soon.
