The way the rules were set up, virtually any bid in the gigabit category beat the megabit category, so Starlink only won in the regions nobody bid in.
In a perfect world, we would all have active optical fiber from the backbone to our home routers. But 5G and satellite internet is cheaper...
But yes. For rural less dense deployments. Long range signal through the air is much cheaper.
Wireless is always cheaper than wired for an equivalent coverage area. It just requires less physical infrastructure. But in almost every other way it has inferior performance.
fiber=c lasers=c fiber=nonlinear lasers=linear
So in physics terms, starlink will eventually surpass buried fiber in latency for all situations where fiber routing divergence from linear exceeds the ~1000km orbital round trip.
We've been getting a thunderstorm every evening here, and my Starlink slows down a lot -- not sure if it's ionization, the water content of clouds, or what, but it's definitely noticeable.
And my previous point-to-point wifi would also essentially stop transferring data when it rained, just in case some Starlink hater thinks it's somehow worse than alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
This is already happening. In many places it is well below half as fast as before. More, and more powerful, birds will help some, but if they need to loft 4000 a year their unit cost will matter.
I expect they will cap subscriptions offered in some areas, particularly parts of Asia and Africa.
That assumes fixed capacity, which isn't at all the case.
Oh wait, I was wrong on all of those!
Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.
The constellation is still growing quickly, they just passed 3000 launched Starlink satellites. By the time they go past the 9.000 satellites or so they should have Starship ready and kick their launch volume into overdrive. Have the 30,000 extra satellites (on top of the 12,000 already approved ones) even been approved yet?
> Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.
What does that even mean? There is no reason to believe they can't launch enough powerful satellites to reach faster speeds in those rural areas.
What makes you doubt the company that made reusable rockets that land on boats and reflux 13+ times won’t do this? The ENTIRE industry said it was impossible but it was fully within the realm of physics. They pulled it off because it was possible.
People doubted they could make it pay, but the US kept handing over money until it did.
That said. I’m sure the US Department of Defense will effectively write SpaceX a blank check after seeing how quickly they switched to spread spectrum frequency hopping to prevent Russian jamming of comms in Ukraine.
You can't deny that they're going to launch the more powerful satellites while simultaneously relying on those more powerful satellites for your calculations of the size of the final constellation...
They're launching at much faster than the rate needed for replacement for the existing planned constellation for the version 1/1.5 satellites.
- Completing the gen 1 constellation, as well as getting gen 2 up.
- All of the ground stations
- Meeting the bandwidth requirements
However, there are potentially other ways SpaceX might be able indirectly benefit.
Another idea I've heard floating around is that Starlink can be used to link ground stations together. This might be very important in those especially hard to reach locations where laying fiber or establishing line of sight, etc might be too complicated/difficult/expensive. I've heard that this is not really a viable solution with gen 1s though.
It's a political move against Elon, just like the previous EV TAX incentive where the strings-attached involved having factories with union labor. Sure $500 is costly, but it's better than nothing.... that's the point.
Then the 4/5G can be set up using a mixture of fiber, line-of-sight or Starlink backhaul, depending on the situation and location.
Of course this is another way that Starlink might be able to win some of these contracts. They could set up (or work with a partner) mini 4/5G networks in these rural areas and also use a mixture of fiber and Starlink backhaul. After all, they still need fiber backhaul for their ground stations anyways.
Starlink customers end up not needing to buy the current, expensive hardware and just use relatively inexpensive 4/5G modems.
I've heard this isn't possible with the gen 1 satellites, so still a theory until the Starship program is off the ground.
It's not better than nothing if you can't afford the $500.
- Not meeting the bandwidth requirements in practice.
- High initial hardware cost.
Starlink effectively being judged not able to meet the program requirements would surely rule them out to be used in connection with RDOF in any capacity?
Starlink might just end up making deals with the companies that won their bids and sell their services/hardware as rebranded solutions. It's probably cheaper for these companies to do this instead of setting up their own infrastructure.
Of course the real question is probably whether not following through on their obligations and getting fined is less than the amount they were awarded.