> They’re covering the planet for cell coverage with 20 satellites? They are not. Of these 20, 13 were the last to launch of the first shell of the direct-to-c

> They’re covering the planet for cell coverage with 20 satellites? They are not. Of these 20, 13 were the last to launch of the first shell of the direct-to-cell constellation, which contains 285 satellites. Once they reach destination orbit (which will still take weeks), Starlink DtC will be able to provide continuous low-throughput comms. > Why do we have so many cell towers? There is a superlinear relationship between total system capacity and the amount of cell towers. The total amount of capacity that Starlink DtC has will be, frankly, pathetic. 10Mb/s sounds good until you realize that that's all the capacity of the beam, that's spread out over a huge geographical area. It will not be replacing cell towers. Instead, it will just end coverage gaps for low-throughput workloads, like sending emergency messages.