On 2020-10-29 13:44, grarpamp wrote:
On 10/28/20, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/27/spacex-starlink-service-priced-at-99-a-month...
Good for remote / mobile locations, but costs much more than 4G / 5G tether.
Musk is not aiming at people in the cities, and probably will not aim at them until he get forty thousand satellites up. His initial target is underserved locations, and with only eight hundred satellites up, cities would overwhelm his capability. Eight hundred is the bare minimum needed to provide rural service in northerly areas. He is hoping to launch another fifteen hundred satellites in the next year, which should suffice for world wide service, but only in thinly populated regions, the countryside, the exurbs, and small towns - quite small towns. He does not intend to provide substantial service to urban centers ever. Fiber and 4G makes more sense in dense areas. In city centers, Starlink will be a high priced premium service for people who want short ping times to the other side of the earth. But, once he gets enough satellites up, it is going to make economic sense to put modest sized server clusters out in the middle of nowhere, and going to be easier to have a multiple server cluster around the world that acts like a single large server cluster from the point of view of its customers.