I would assume that cell towers will absolutely love Starlink as a backhaul.

Think how much easier it gets to stand up a tower when all you need is electricity on-site.

Out here it is purely economics and population density. I live in West TN and the nearest cell phone tower is 7 miles in a straight line from my house. There is one provider that works here, and a good signal is 2 bards, but usually, 1 is normal and things like 4g or LTE rarely work.

I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.

I am willing to bet that changes once Starlink is within the finish line. My dad talks of a small town here in Canada that refused to upgrade the towers and when a private citizen started applying to create his own company magically it was suddenly economic for Telus to put up a tower.

I know that I feel ripped off every single day by what we pay for mobile data compared to the rest of the world. If Starlink suddenly shows up there is an alternative to Bell Rogers Telus. They should be shaking in their boots. It should be easy for Starlink to undercut their business because they made a business out of customer gouging.

> a good signal is 2 bards

Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed...

Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps.

So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far slower than my first modem :)

Each letter in sensible english sentences carries only about 1 bit worth of information. So assuming 5 words per second and each word is 5 letters on average, it's just 25 bps per bard.

If it's not sensible, I'm sure the speed will also be correspondingly slower.

Lots of nimbyism, for a start.