4 ms·

I've always thought that any service that gets delivered over media strung on a telephone pole aught to be regulated as a utility. There are only so many cables

by krunck 3y ago

I've always thought that any service that gets delivered over media strung on a telephone pole aught to be regulated as a utility. There are only so many cables you can hang off a pole before it becomes a technical and aesthetic problem. I submit that the same goes for satellites in orbit. How many 5000+ constellations will there be around the planet before we run into space congestion/traffic and aesthetic problems?

Ajedi32 3y ago
I suspect you'd run out of spectrum long before you'd run out of orbits. But we'll see. Maybe there are use-cases for megaconstelations that don't require as much spectrum as an ISP, especially once there's the ability to interface with an existing LEO-based ISP.
- lxgr 3y ago
  That's definitely the case for omnidirectional ground stations, i.e. most cell phones (beamforming/MIMO as used in 4G/5G and Wi-Fi nonwithstanding, since that mostly leverages heavy multipath propagation which is presumably not a thing for line-of-sight communication to satellites). The only reason there is even a point for Starlink to have more than one satellite covering the same geographic footprint simultaneously is that both the satellites and the ground stations use phased array antennas and are largely stationary (or at least are moving somewhat predictably/rotating in space fairly slowly), which allows reusing the same frequency for customers in the same ground cell at the same time from two different satellites. Highly mobile ground stations will likely continue to be served by a single satellite per ground location for the foreseeable future, which makes spectrum the scarce resource.
Narkov 3y ago
> How many 5000+ constellations will there be around the planet before we run into space congestion/traffic and aesthetic problems? I think you underestimate just how big space is.
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by krunck 3y ago

Ajedi32 3y ago

I suspect you'd run out of spectrum long before you'd run out of orbits. But we'll see. Maybe there are use-cases for megaconstelations that don't require as much spectrum as an ISP, especially once there's the ability to interface with an existing LEO-based ISP.

lxgr 3y ago
That's definitely the case for omnidirectional ground stations, i.e. most cell phones (beamforming/MIMO as used in 4G/5G and Wi-Fi nonwithstanding, since that mostly leverages heavy multipath propagation which is presumably not a thing for line-of-sight communication to satellites). The only reason there is even a point for Starlink to have more than one satellite covering the same geographic footprint simultaneously is that both the satellites and the ground stations use phased array antennas and are largely stationary (or at least are moving somewhat predictably/rotating in space fairly slowly), which allows reusing the same frequency for customers in the same ground cell at the same time from two different satellites. Highly mobile ground stations will likely continue to be served by a single satellite per ground location for the foreseeable future, which makes spectrum the scarce resource.

Narkov 3y ago

> How many 5000+ constellations will there be around the planet before we run into space congestion/traffic and aesthetic problems? I think you underestimate just how big space is.

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