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Each starlink satellite can only handle ~20Gibps of throughput across all customers connecting. Say there's 10,000 of these in space, that's 200,000Gibps or 19
by cobookman 6y ago
Each starlink satellite can only handle ~20Gibps of throughput across all customers connecting.
Say there's 10,000 of these in space, that's 200,000Gibps or 195Tibps.
I don't think that's enough bandwidth for high speed internet for hundreds of millions of customers.
However I suspect it'll be cheaper and faster for sparsley populated areas. With Urban areas still leveraging physical wires.
- francislavoie 6y agoThe constellation is designed to be cycled out, so they'll continually be launching more and/or newer satellites over time. The next generation ones will likely be able to support more bandwidth.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoIt already has started doing so. The OP's 20Gibps number comes from the 2016 FCC filing which has 10Gibps full duplex. An Elon tweet now says 50Gibps half duplex.
- superkuh 6y agoAll good stuff but you can only reuse the spectrum marginally from LEO even with the sharpest directional pattern spot beams. With physical transmission line you get the entire spectrum for every single run.
- Scoundreller 6y agoJust curious, why not for LEO? If Echostar can draw patterns like this from geosync, shouldn't the same be possible with an LEO? Or are the satellites spinning/bouncing around too much? https://rvseniormoments.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/07_ka-band-gen-5-coverage-beams-small.jpg https://rvseniormoments.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/07_ka-ba...
- superkuh 6y agoFor GEO it's even worse. Those are very large shared "spot" beams in the echostar ka band image. From LEO starlink sats can do down to ~15km radius.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoYup, Starlink will be crappy in suburban and urban areas, too many people to share a satellite with. Starlink isn't for people who hate their Big3 ISP. It's for people who wish they had a Big3 ISP to hate.
- Yeroc 6y agoI wonder whether we'll see the day when the satellites themselves can contain say, Netflix/Amazon/Disney cache servers to cut down on back haul traffic?
- ajay-b 6y agoSo what you’re saying is we should increase the number of satellites ten fold.
- cperciva 6y agoI think it's safe to assume that someone at Starlink has crunched the numbers and thinks they can make a profit from fully-utilized satellites. I doubt "what if there's too many customers?" is a problem Starlink is worried about; if that happens, they're raking in money hand over fist and they can afford to launch more satellites.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI doubt they're public, but I'd really like to see graphical models of that. "Hrmmmmm, if we put 100 satellite into this orbital plane, we'll cover 74m people, 25m of which have shit internet, 5m pissed off Canadians, and with an average monthly spend on data of _____, and on average using Xgb/s in peak hours, etc." But if we shift the plane a bit to the left we'll get.... I also wonder how they'll price discriminate it all. Flat rate really doesn't make sense if they're constrained for capacity.
- tw04 6y agoI don't think they were ever planning on hundreds of millions of customers. The price makes it a nonstarter for 75% of the worlds population. Between Canada and the US the number of people with no other options likely numbers in the 10s of millions, not hundreds.
- Scoundreller 6y ago> Each starlink satellite can only handle ~20Gibps Just running the math, as 2 people that uses ~250gb/m total, that's 2000gib / 2.7m seconds in a month, we're using on average .0007Gibps. (Badly) assuming perfect distribution of demand, each 20Gibps could support 30k connections like us. While there are 10k of these satellites in space, I'm not sure how many (if any) are overlapping the same area. They're probably hovering over an ocean half the time.