Well your first line was "By Musk's own admission, it can never be competitive against the cellular providers" and then the rebuttal was based around a strong example of it beating cellular providers inside their coverage range.
You can understand the confusion.
By only needing 5000 "towers".
So, it can be competitive.
5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable - the USA already has a huge percentage of the population covered today - and has nice benefit of being an already profitable business to be in, and construction can be done by anyone with hands, tools and a vehicle. The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Emphasis on up to. They only have 3000 right now and it already works. If they go above 5000 it's because they think they will make more money that way, not because they need more than 5000.
> 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable
The US has hundreds of thousands of towers, and that number gets a lot bigger with 5G.
And while that covers "a huge percentage of the population", not all of that is fast, and reaching the rest of the population gets harder and harder.
> replacing on a 5 year cycle
> The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Let's say a cell tower lasts 20 years, which is a bit longer than two cell technology generations. So that means starlink needs to launch about a thousand satellites per year to maintain their network over the whole planet. And cell providers need to rebuild 20 thousand cell sites per year just in the US, more if they try to cover everyone.
Starlink can launch that many satellites with about $300M. Let's round way up to $500M a year to keep satellites and base stations running.
Each year cell companies are pulling in hundreds of billions and putting tens of billions into towers, just in the US.
The only question I ask is, "is there a sustainable market for affordable satellite internet access?". There is no debate it is the best connection for some people right now, but if it is unsustainable that's good for no one in long term. Before Starlink, satellite internet was far more expensive.
Yet to turn a profit, and some big headwinds in way of competitive pressures from other cheaper technologies.
I am also a Starlink customer and live in the middle of nowhere, so... For the little my example is worth as well, I haven't seen anything like as good as those speeds where I am in Washington State, for some time. Over the same period, cellular has appeared in places it wasn't before.
Cellular doesn't need to reach everyone to be big enough to end the dream of affordable satellite access, and the cellular providers fight for the same government money many countries provide to improve connections for the most poorly connected regions. Assuming you are free of trees (a big problem!), Starlink so far only works well at really low density deployments - a huge detractor in many assessments comparing it to cellular deployments, even in remote regions.
Leaked slide deck from company declared optimum deployments is 100 customers per 300km squared, their "100 per 300 rule". Maybe this is better today and gets better with time, but cellular has a lot of radio advantages and a lot of existing infra to expand from. Also doesn't need spaceships.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UOI7b5flgAjJrPs2HDa64p_ZABc...