First off, these constellations will (in theory) have fewer tradeoffs vs terrestrial networks.
At only 350-800 miles up, they are much lower latency than current satellite based Internet. These in theory add similar levels of latency as DOCSIS - and tolerable levels to most internet based applications.
It won't replace fiber for very latency sensitive applications - but being able to deliver a tremendous amount of bandwidth virtually anywhere with a penalty of only ~7-10ms is very compelling.
Secondly, in rural areas, everyone has a view of the sky. Very few have compelling fiber, or even cable/DSL options.
This could dramatically reduce the cost of backhaul services to ground based cellular stations - and improve connectivity in a variety of other ways.
If it's cheap enough.
On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worldwide is already covered by 3G or 4G networks. I am not sure that space will be able to offer lower prices for backhaul if the infrastructure is already there. A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites.
First, and less importantly, source. Because phone companies love to toss out coverage numbers that are pure, unadulterated bullshit. But second that's less important because 3G and 4G are both completely uncompetitive for broadband. LTE is basically the minimum there. And awful data caps and congestion remain a serious issue all over the place.
>A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites.
Is it? I mean, seriously. A lot of SpaceX's plans are based on estimated launch costs via Super Heavy, so necessarily somewhat speculative. But the target is sub-$100/kg, and at least in terms of fundamentals (like cost of fuel, Raptor effectiveness, estimated cadence) that doesn't look ridiculous. Each Starlink satellite apparently has a mass over around 230 kg. Add a bit of extra mass for some bigger sats in the mix, double the launch cost to be a bit more conservative, and we're still talking a launch cost per satellite of well under $60k a piece. They necessarily have everything needed to operate their design lifetime, because there is no maintenance that can be done on them. They're operating low enough that solar weather shouldn't be too constant a concern, and of course will never face OPEX costs like vegetation clearing or weather damage or corrosion or the like. Also doesn't face NIMBY tower politics either. Is it actually more expensive then running fiber and building/maintaining a tower? For very high density locations probably, but there's a pretty sizable population in the US alone for whom it seems on napkin math it could be very competitive.
Regarding the costs, I am not sure where your 60k/sat is coming form. Currently, launch costs for SpaceX are in the millions (60 commercially, let's say 30 millions cost), and they are launching 60 satellites at a time, so at least 500k/sat.
I am not sure that they will be able to cut the launch costs by a factor of 10, even considering resusability, larger launch capacity, etc, etc.
[1] https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads...
In the first Starlink launch, with 60 satellites of ~230 kg each, the cost of launch was ~$30M (considering that the "retail price" of a Falcon 9 launch is $60M, I guess that half the cost if a good assumption). Thus, the cost per kg was $30M / (60 * 230 kg) ~ $2,000/kg. I just don't see how they are going to achieve a x10 reduction in cost, even considering reusability, larger masses, etc, etc.
For cities, you're right - 5G + high frequency wavelengths is probably cheaper - but not by that much assuming SpaceX's numbers are accurate.
The problem is 85% of the population is absolutely not covered by high frequency spectrum - tower/DAS coverage is optimized for sub 1Ghz bands. We would need billions upon billions of additional tower builds to deliver an adequate experience on spectrum that basically requires line of sight. Even in cities. Some of that has been invested already (e.g. VZ can reuse their Fios plant in many locations), but certainly not everywhere.
Satellites may very well be more cost effective.
Consider the reverse.
As internet access becomes a staple service for modern living, one’s options for location are restricted to where internet is available: 3G coverage at a barely functional minimum.
Want to solve the housing crisis? poverty? Bring at least LTE performance (100Mbs better) everywhere at a competitive flat rate. Today, many options are untenable for want of a decent data rate.
What percentage of the world population has internet access of any kind? of land area? of anything over 1Mbps? Huge untapped markets there.
I see this building up like onset of digital photography: nobody expected supplanting film & paper, yet the whole world switched seemingly overnight. Kodak went from most valuable brand to “who?” fast.
Once people see Starlink working fast, reliably, and anywhere they’ll switch en masse. Personally, as a 100% telecommuter, the only thing stopping me from moving where I want is internet connectivity.
One billion customers divided by 40,000 Starlink satellites is a very manageable 25,000 users each. Sometime please run the numbers on supporting 100Mbps for each, plus latency. Given that, I expect a huge migration of customers.
Big cities could benefit if a lot of the load on existing networks shifts to Starlink. Better service for everyone.
Not everything is simply competition / winner-take-all in market economics, even if that's the tendency.
They have nothing to do in big cities, they cannot deliver the required data-rate density (bps/km2).
Cities are spaced ~1200km apart in much of the world.
Keep in mind current cell phone coverage is spotty, with many unserved or underserved areas, and towns where Verizon is clearly better than AT&T, or vice versa.
Running that kind of cell tower network might be cheaper, but running a cell phone network that spans every inch of the globe would be an engineering and logistics feat that would almost be impossible to profit off of.
Even maintenance-wise, servicing a cell tower requires keeping a bunch of contractors around to drive to drive, fly, or even boat to remote areas, and climb a hundred feet once they get there. With starlink, they can just piggyback replacement satellites on customer payloads.
Also, there are around 4 million cell towers in the world to achieve spotty coverage, whereas starlink is targeting 40k satellites for global coverage. I'd have to believe that launching 40,000 similar payloads via similar methods has huge vertical integration advantages over the extremely heterogeneous approaches we use to put up those millions of towers.
So the ideal situation would be Starlink for remote areas, and in medium to higher density areas put up towers that talk to Starlink, then can speak to local receivers using terrestrial radio technologies.
I want 100Mbps 1TB/mo anywhere.
Who is this mystery company building fiber-delivered internet in big cities? You must not be talking about the US, because:
#CenturyLink
#Verizon
Were the major players building out, and all have stopped. That's ignoring the tens of millions of people who don't live in the city and have 3Mbps DSL as their best case scenario. And that's ignoring the mess in Australia and Canada. There will be PLENTY of demand for high speed, low latency satellite.
If the solution was to provide Internet wirelessly, we would have that right now. The cell phone infrastructure provides much higher data-densities than any satellite network will ever be able to provide.
It is not happening because it's very difficult to do that with the spectrum allocated for mobile services. A network of towers can provide higher capacity densities than what SpaceX's 30k satellite systems will be able to.
In big cities, they will fall very sort of the capacity required. The current 4,409 satellite proposal has beams of ~700 Mbps, and each of those covers a surface larger than the whole NYC metropolitan area. The capacity scales linearly with the number of satellites in line-of-sight (LoS). Right now, with the 4,409 satellite system you can have ~40 satellites in LoS, so they can provide ~28 Gbps of throughput to the whole city. Even with 30k satellites, they will only be able to provide ~196 Gbps. That is not enough to offer any uncapped data plan.
Why do you continue referencing one of the most densely populated cities in the world as the unit of measure? This is for un-served and under-served areas which is half the globe. Of course they aren't building this to displace NYC's current ISPs. They clearly ran financials before investing... you seem like you're just trying to find a reason to say it's stupid without bothering to consider that someone smarter than you MIGHT have done a little research before spending a couple billion dollars.
According to my analyses, there needs to be a disruptive change in how we receive broadband Internet to close the business case (that's why I keep talking about Displacing ISPs). The unconnected and undeserved broadband market plays great in the US and Canada, but in the rest of the world, there is simply not such a market. At best, you are going to try to provide backhauk for a cell phone network or some other kind of access point. The whole 3B of unconnected people rethoric is very slim. Those people can afford to pay very little every month for connectivity, so it's very hard to make money out of it (even to offset your marginal costs).
In terms of performance, there are diminishing returns on each extra satellite that you launch. The ones already up there are already satisfying a lot of the demand, so each newly launched satellite is active for a shorter and shorter percentage of time.
Starlink is a (in my opinion) very oversized system. I do not think they will launch the full 4,409 constellation (as it stands today), and I am pretty confident they will not launch a 30,000 satellite constellation.
Finally, LEO networks are not the most cost effective space networks. GEO HTS and MEO networks have lower CAPEX/GB.
Now a cheap DSL modem is $10, and it's all a single SoC.
Phased array satellite modems will follow the same price curve.
I don't think it will happen in the next 3 years though. I think that most of the manufacturers are focusing on the high-end market, and first terminals will be in the thousands of dolars.
Beyond that they want to charge like it's a cell phone.
As of today, there is probably ~ 1 Tbps of usable capacity in space (wordlwide). With such a big constellation they could provide 100x this capacity, but who is going to buy it? How are they going to compete with fiber-delivered Internet in big cities? They cannot offer the same QoS, so you do not want space delivered Internet if you can have it through terrestrial networks.