Starlink is the highest capacity satellite network by far and the entire constellation’s RF capacity would struggle to compete with a single undersea fiber cabl

Starlink is the highest capacity satellite network by far and the entire constellation’s RF capacity would struggle to compete with a single undersea fiber cable. It’s hard to put into perspective how impressive modern fiber is. Each wavelength carries many gigabits per second so FDM lets you pack terabits/sec onto a single fiber. Undersea cables can easily bundle 50 fibers, with the primary constraint being the repeaters. Confluence-1 is supposed to carry 500 tbps with just 24 pairs. In comparison, at a generous 50gbps a sat, that’s 1000 satellites of capacity in a single cable. And that’s not even possible logistically due to orbit distributions and inter-sat interference aiming all of their RF beams at one spot. All that said, starlink is an incredible technology for “last mile access” that will globally eat the market for remote locations with nothing coming close to competing. It’s just that undersea cable is still moving orders of magnitude more volume.