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Starlink seems to be somewhat limited in using a ~400 km^2 cell of shared bandwidth instead of a 4 km^2 cell typical of older mobile networks, a 0.04 km^2 cell
by mapt 3y ago
Starlink seems to be somewhat limited in using a ~400 km^2 cell of shared bandwidth instead of a 4 km^2 cell typical of older mobile networks, a 0.04 km^2 cell which is more appropriate for newer 5G service, or a 0.0004km^2 wifi cell that covers most of the house.
It's perfect for a sailboat or a wartime forward operating base, but not so much for a city.
That may not be very relevant now, as barely anyone uses Starlink and as their bandwidth needs are 2024 bandwidth needs rather than 2034 or 2044. But eventually, starting with the densest cells, congestion will occur. If your city is tied to an electrical grid, it's not that much harder to run gobs of fiber.
Starlink could shrink cell size with larger antennas (see Starlink 2.0), but I suspect it's abusing the deep magic of phased array antenna gain to expect a many-phased-array-N-to-many-phased-array-M network connection to scale feasibly at high SNR. Just taking a clever mathematical innovation and asking it to do things in too many dimensions with too many orders of magnitude improvements.
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The problems with physical/geometrical high-gain antennas are not so arcane; I wouldn't be surprised if we go back to dishes or equivalently free-space optical networking for fixed antennas. You could run an almost indefinite number of satellite-client connections simultaneously in something as high-gain as a laser/LED launch telescope.
- c2h5oh 3y agoAFAIK cities was never the target Starlink market as those are supposed to have cheaper and/or faster options either over copper or fiber. Starlink works well in my rural middle of nowhere and has no competition.
- ryandrake 3y agoI mean, Grass Valley is rural, but not "middle of nowhere" rural (source: fellow Gold Countryite). If broadband companies actually don't serve that town well, then they really have no good excuse. I also thought the target market for Starlink was boats and very remote outposts, not "minor towns that are just within civilization." It's shameful if ISPs can't be arsed to serve somewhere like that.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoIt's worse than that; I'm half a mile from a major Obama-era fiber loop with open access rules for any ISP to buy service there. There's no significant ISP selling connections to it. (There's a couple of tiny neighborhood co-ops like the Beckville Network.) Classic last mile cost problems combined with terrible regulation of the monopoly providers like Comcast and AT&T. We have a pretty robust local WISP. But that's expensive and not great performance. Starlink is really my best option.
- mapt 3y agoPoint to point wireless is an underappreciated tool. Building a tower half a mile away and pointing a hundred small dishes individually at various customers with their own dishes pointed at the tower, might be cheaper than running fiber to a hundred spread-out houses. Assuming no coordination problems. You just need a lot of extra signal slack built into the system if you want it resilient to weather.
- dtaht 3y agoSee: https://www.taranawireless.com/ https://www.taranawireless.com/
- dtaht 3y agoOn top of everything else I do, I run a pretty good email discussion list for starlink stuff, over here: https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/starlink/ https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/starlink/