With a good population of Marine customers, even without laser links, they could hopscotch packets down to another terminal, up to another bird, down again, as

With a good population of Marine customers, even without laser links, they could hopscotch packets down to another terminal, up to another bird, down again, as many times as needed to get to shore. Probably not more than a half-dozen extra hops, usually. And, better than no service at all. But with, what, 4k birds up, and speed below 50Mbps? More birds won't help data rate much if licensed RF bandwidth is saturating.