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A starlink satellite only covers a small area. That's why they need 4,000 just to provide bare minimum service.
by shaklee3 7y ago
A 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.
- shaklee3 7y agoCell towers aren't a great comparison. They tend to heavily lump them in dense areas, and you have many companies who've built infrastructure in the same place to get to that number. SpaceX doesn't have as much control over covering more dense areas, short of launching more satellites.