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If you want to make facetious arguments, starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites, thousands of launches to install and ultimately maintain, plus a fleet of

by giobox 4y ago

If you want to make facetious arguments, starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites, thousands of launches to install and ultimately maintain, plus a fleet of space ships”… I’m being charitable and not mentioning that each of those potential 42,000 needs replacing on a 5 year cycle - they don’t just go up there and stay there forever. 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable - the USA already has a huge percentage of the population covered today - and has nice benefit of being an already profitable business to be in, and construction can be done by anyone with hands, tools and a vehicle. The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.

Dylan16807 4y ago
> starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites Emphasis on up to. They only have 3000 right now and it already works. If they go above 5000 it's because they think they will make more money that way, not because they need more than 5000. > 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable The US has hundreds of thousands of towers, and that number gets a lot bigger with 5G. And while that covers "a huge percentage of the population", not all of that is fast, and reaching the rest of the population gets harder and harder. > replacing on a 5 year cycle > The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years. Let's say a cell tower lasts 20 years, which is a bit longer than two cell technology generations. So that means starlink needs to launch about a thousand satellites per year to maintain their network over the whole planet. And cell providers need to rebuild 20 thousand cell sites per year just in the US, more if they try to cover everyone. Starlink can launch that many satellites with about $300M. Let's round way up to $500M a year to keep satellites and base stations running. Each year cell companies are pulling in hundreds of billions and putting tens of billions into towers, just in the US.

by giobox 4y ago

Dylan16807 4y ago

> starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites Emphasis on up to. They only have 3000 right now and it already works. If they go above 5000 it's because they think they will make more money that way, not because they need more than 5000. > 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable The US has hundreds of thousands of towers, and that number gets a lot bigger with 5G. And while that covers "a huge percentage of the population", not all of that is fast, and reaching the rest of the population gets harder and harder. > replacing on a 5 year cycle > The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years. Let's say a cell tower lasts 20 years, which is a bit longer than two cell technology generations. So that means starlink needs to launch about a thousand satellites per year to maintain their network over the whole planet. And cell providers need to rebuild 20 thousand cell sites per year just in the US, more if they try to cover everyone. Starlink can launch that many satellites with about $300M. Let's round way up to $500M a year to keep satellites and base stations running. Each year cell companies are pulling in hundreds of billions and putting tens of billions into towers, just in the US.