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I don't follow your economic logic. Are you saying 100,000 customers need 100,000 different satellites which is too many to be used efficiently on the rest of t

• Retric 4y ago
  That was in reference to the capacity to handle X customers per square mile not total. If you want to average 100,000 customers per square mile over a wide area you need a fuckton of satellites over that area. Basically a network that handles 1 customer per square mile might in theory have say 40 million customers worldwide eventually. A network capable of handling 10 people per square mile might cost 10x as much, but only increase that to say 120 million because some areas have less than 10 potential customers per square mile. Increasing that to say 100 or even 100,000 people per square mile would vastly increase the cost, but you hit heavy diminishing returns with a lower percentage of areas reaching those densities and many people with better internet options than starlink or simply can’t afford the service.
• gridspy 4y ago
  The key thing to understand is that any specific satellite spends far more time over the ocean than over a dense city. So for each busy satellite you have 10 to 100 others on the same orbit which are still cruising over the ocean. To maximize efficiency you want to have similar load wherever the satellite is.