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I wonder what the feasibility is of deploying solar powered cell towers that use Starlink as an uplink. If a cell signal can go 25 miles then you should be abl

I wonder what the feasibility is of deploying solar powered cell towers that use Starlink as an uplink. If a cell signal can go 25 miles then you should be able to locate the cells 50 miles apart. That would give you about 400 cell sites that that cover 1000 square miles. What is the cost / feasibility of doing something like this?

jillesvangurp 4y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if that more or less is the plan. It's probably not particularly cheap but it probably beats having to install many thousands of kilometers of cables all over rural New Zealand. But let's do the back of the envelope math. A typical 5G base station would use a couple of KW of power. My guess is they'd use ones with more range, which probably means more power. Let's call it 5kw. I'm not an expert but that seems a reasonable number. Maybe it's a bit high. Maybe it's a bit low. I don't know, I'm probably biasing to too high. So, if you'd need to power that 24x7 using solar you obviously need some battery and enough solar panels to top those up even on the most cloudy days. If you have a 50kw solar setup, you'd be generating 10x more power than you need on a sunny day for about one third of that day. So you end up with roughly 3x more power than you need at best and probably some reasonable portion of that on average. On a bad day that might drop by a factor 20. So, you need probably at least a week or two of battery to play it safe. If you assume a complete absence of light, you'd need about 120 kwh per day. Of course that's not realistic. So it could be a bit less than that as you always get at least some power. A tesla powerwall would be not enough, a tesla megapack (~2.7M $) would probably be overkill. Probably about a quarter to a fifth of that would be plenty. Probably less. Not particularly cheap but doable probably. Add a windmill to the mix and you can probably get away with a lot less solar and battery. Probably a few hundred thousand would go a long way and a few tens of thousands would be on the low end of the spectrum. Let's call it 100K per site plus or minus 25% or so. Doing ten of these cost a million. Doing 1000 of these 100 million. Doing 10000 of these a billion. New Zealand is a 100000 square miles (to stick with your numbers and miles). So, you'd need about 40000 of these things. So a few billion. I bet there are probably multiple creative ways to get that number down a bit. So, not cheap but doable. At worst billions in cost.
- niccl 4y ago
  plus the helicopter access (since almost by definition these new sites are in hard-to-access places) for cleaning the solar panels and other maintenance. snow on solar panels can be an issue, as well as just dust and other
- morepork 4y ago
  If they're planning true 100% coverage, a lot of NZ's back country is mountainous so I doubt you'd get the max range as that would be in ideal, presumably flat, areas. However, the power requirements are probably a lot lower than a typical urban base station as they will be getting hardly any traffic.
TylerE 4y ago
Probably not much? Basically all of NZ (that isn’t urban) is mountainous… attitude helps with line of sight.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if that more or less is the plan. It's probably not particularly cheap but it probably beats having to install many thousands of kilometers of cables all over rural New Zealand. But let's do the back of the envelope math. A typical 5G base station would use a couple of KW of power. My guess is they'd use ones with more range, which probably means more power. Let's call it 5kw. I'm not an expert but that seems a reasonable number. Maybe it's a bit high. Maybe it's a bit low. I don't know, I'm probably biasing to too high. So, if you'd need to power that 24x7 using solar you obviously need some battery and enough solar panels to top those up even on the most cloudy days. If you have a 50kw solar setup, you'd be generating 10x more power than you need on a sunny day for about one third of that day. So you end up with roughly 3x more power than you need at best and probably some reasonable portion of that on average. On a bad day that might drop by a factor 20. So, you need probably at least a week or two of battery to play it safe. If you assume a complete absence of light, you'd need about 120 kwh per day. Of course that's not realistic. So it could be a bit less than that as you always get at least some power. A tesla powerwall would be not enough, a tesla megapack (~2.7M $) would probably be overkill. Probably about a quarter to a fifth of that would be plenty. Probably less. Not particularly cheap but doable probably. Add a windmill to the mix and you can probably get away with a lot less solar and battery. Probably a few hundred thousand would go a long way and a few tens of thousands would be on the low end of the spectrum. Let's call it 100K per site plus or minus 25% or so. Doing ten of these cost a million. Doing 1000 of these 100 million. Doing 10000 of these a billion. New Zealand is a 100000 square miles (to stick with your numbers and miles). So, you'd need about 40000 of these things. So a few billion. I bet there are probably multiple creative ways to get that number down a bit. So, not cheap but doable. At worst billions in cost.

niccl 4y ago
plus the helicopter access (since almost by definition these new sites are in hard-to-access places) for cleaning the solar panels and other maintenance. snow on solar panels can be an issue, as well as just dust and other
morepork 4y ago
If they're planning true 100% coverage, a lot of NZ's back country is mountainous so I doubt you'd get the max range as that would be in ideal, presumably flat, areas. However, the power requirements are probably a lot lower than a typical urban base station as they will be getting hardly any traffic.

TylerE 4y ago

Probably not much? Basically all of NZ (that isn’t urban) is mountainous… attitude helps with line of sight.