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How can this be cost competitive against cell towers connected to fiber backbones? This seems like the obvious future, as towers are already being built, upgra
by pdq 7y ago
How can this be cost competitive against cell towers connected to fiber backbones? This seems like the obvious future, as towers are already being built, upgraded, and replaced due to the explosion in data demand for mobile phones.
For Starlink, launching satellites are both incredibly expensive and hard to maintain. And likely they will have much lower bandwidth than cell towers, and the uplink hardware will be much more expensive than cellular hardware.
- latchkey 7y agoRight... I have traveled all over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by motorbike. Been in the deepest areas of nowhere, 100's of KM from anyone or anything. I had solid 4G connections everywhere except the deepest valleys, because the military has installed towers literally everywhere.
- mantap 7y agoIt's not about wealth it's about population density. Think not about dense areas like Vietnam but sparsely populated places such as Australia, Canada, Russia, etc. Of course the problem with this is that there's relatively not many people who live in the middle of nowhere because most people want to live near civilization. So I am doubtful that starlink will be an economic success.
- latchkey 7y agoNone of the 3 countries I mentioned are densely populated, especially in the areas I'm talking about, and especially Laos, who get all their telcom infrastructure from Vietnam and China.
- Baeocystin 7y agoIf you aren't on the coast, there's a whole lot of empty space in Vietnam. Same goes for Laos and places not bordering the Mekong.
- Baeocystin 7y agoI lived in Laos back in the late 70's/early 80's. One of the big treats we got was 30 minutes of phone call time back home to the states on Christmas. Barring that, it was 3-month-round-trip mail via diplomatic pouch. Now I can hop on to any number of free webcams in Vientiane and check out the happenings where I used to live just for the heck of it, no questions asked, no money required. Sometimes it still shocks me how much the world has changed in the past few decades!
- latchkey 7y agoI bet you have some amazing stories. Have you made it back at all? Vientiane is all grown up and becoming a bit of a popular expat area. Vangvieng is super popular with backpackers and Luang Prabang is a bit of a tourist trap, but is still tiny and really beautiful. I spent about a week just hanging out in Nong Khiaw... tiny little town on the river, super relaxing. The infrastructure is changing a lot too. Roads are becoming real roads. Chinese are moving in and building roads and hydro dams all through the country. Bought up all the land from the locals. Really a total eco disaster that nobody is talking about.
- Baeocystin 7y agoOh, lots of stories, for sure. Being one of the very few foreigners around during the water festival meant is was 100% impossible to get home without getting utterly soaked, in the friendliest possible way. And I remember clearly there was only one English sign anywhere in the Vientiane Airport, and it was a warning before the metal detector that said 'No Guns, No Knives, No Durian' in many different languages. More than one flight to Bangkok had someone casually cleaning their rifle to pass the time, and knives were shrugged at. They Meant It when it came to trying to take a durian on the plane, though! // I would very much like to return and see how things have changed. Things haven't aligned to make it possible for me, yet, but it's on the list. Here's a small gallery from the National Day parade in 1980, if you're interested: https://imgur.com/a/GRmSl https://imgur.com/a/GRmSl
- latchkey 7y ago
- jjeaff 7y agoYou should try rural southern U.S. Good luck finding a 4G connection.
- latchkey 7y agoIf only the US military controlled the US telcos like the Vietnamese military does... oh wait. ;-)
- kiba 7y agoGoogle suggests 150K minimum for a cell tower. Another search suggests that a Starlink satellite costs one million dollars, based on the assumption of a Falcon 9 launch and does not include any improvement in costs. So, it's an order of magnitude increase in costs if we assume that a cell tower have the same capabilities and do the same thing as a starlink satellite, which it does not, since a cell tower is just a structure you can lease to host equipment on. I wonder how much is the capital expenditure is for infrastructure spending versus the number of cell towers? According to google, there are 307,626 towers in the United States. Another source gave me 55.71 billion expenditure for calendar year 2018 which also includes maintenance. Divide the expenditure by towers gives me 181,096 USD spent per tower. So, 350,000 dollars versus 1,000,000 dollars. Hmm.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crb002 7y agoThat cell tower only covers a small geographical area, and you have to physically maintain it along with paying property taxes. Also, that cell tower can't peer with other cell towers to route trans continental packets. Not to mention how much will DOD subsidize their own sub-constellation for SkyNet to prime the cashflow? I'm guessing at least $50 billion.
- shaklee3 7y agoA starlink satellite only covers a small area. That's why they need 4,000 just to provide bare minimum service.
- zaroth 7y agoGoogle says there are ~300,000 cell towers in the United States. Napkin math says the satellites appear to cover about an order of magnitude more ground. But more accurately, it’s a question of how many birds are in the sky above you at a given moment, and how narrowly you want to focus their antenna based on the desired bandwidth availability per square mile. It’s the same idea with place cell sites closer together at lower power, except I imagine the satellite constellation design can’t be tailored around specific dense environments, and rather will provide a relatively constant global density, or constant bandwidth densities at certain latitudes.
- danw1979 7y agoPush on through the hand-wavey bit at the beginning and there's some treatment of your question. haven't finished it yet but it's a good read so far...
- shmerl 7y agoSpaceX want to make it. Incumbent ISPs don't, that's the difference.
- shaklee3 7y agoWhat about iridium? They didn't want to make it?
- shmerl 7y agoI don't think they wanted to make such massive constellation like SpaceX, so I assume they have way more limited capacity. And their satellites are much bigger.
- shaklee3 7y agoSorry, my point was that they really wanted the tech to work financially as well, and it's the closest to starlink that we have today. Iridium remains one of those stories for how things can be far more expensive than planned, despite the difficult tech actually working.
- avmich 7y agoThe article explains the case of Iridium. Basically, Iridium is severely constrained by not having very cheap satellite launch capabilities.
- wcoenen 7y agoIridium focuses on applications that require low power use and a small antenna, but don't need much bandwidth. (Phones, telemetry, emergency text messages, ...) So indeed, they didn't want to make an internet backbone.
- new_realist 7y agoWhat about Teledesic?