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There are almost certainly always going to be restrictions, because the bandwidth density on the ground is going to be limited. For example, a lot of recreatio
by Tuna-Fish 6y ago
There are almost certainly always going to be restrictions, because the bandwidth density on the ground is going to be limited.
For example, a lot of recreational boaters are likely to get a terminal, which will work well over the open ocean. However, when all of those boaters tie their boat at the LA marina, there is absolutely no hope that the system can provide anything even approximating good service to them. So mobile starlink connections will almost certainly come with some language about how they work so long as you stay away from other people.
- _ph_ 6y agoNot sure that the LA marina would be the bottleneck, but it totally makes sense to limit customers to one cell in the early phases of the software. On the one side there are capacity concerns, which will lessen as they have more satellites up. On the other side, it can be quite simple software limitations, like implementing the hand-over between cells. By limiting the system to fixed cells initially, a lot of complexity is removed.
- rcxdude 6y agoExactly. I know Iridium has this problem, e.g. it's very popular to use their satellite modems to track cargo containers while they're being shipped: when a big container ship pulls into port and they all wake up and report their position at once, the network suffers a fair amount (and this is with far lower bandwidth).