[trident5000]

Awesome. My wireless bill is too high and competition never hurt. I would think satellites are way cheaper than setting up ground based towers and therefore will offer cheaper service.

[paxys]

Satellite-based internet and cell services aren't competing in the same space as your regular cell carrier. They aren't going to make your phone plan cheaper.

[adolph]

Give it time.

  train : plane :: land line : cell phone :: terrestrial : satellite

The transition won't be instant and there will still be a place for terrestrial cell service for a long time, but the future favors flexibility and ubiquity.

The big challenge/opportunity will come when a non-US player arrives, like Thuraya after Iridium and the NSA can't slurp down all telephony.

[ijhuygft776]

why arent they if they work with regular phones?

[malfist]

You think satellites are cheaper than ground towers?

Even if they were cheaper, a satellite is limited to 7Mbits/s. A 5G tower can handle 10Gbits/s. And you don't even have to price a cell tower by the kilogram.

[trident5000]

Limited by what? Where is this limitation metric coming from? Is this from Starlink?

[blcknight]

It’s a fallback for dead zones (as the article explains). I wouldn’t expect this to become its own standalone provider anytime soon.

[trident5000]

Ah yes I see that. Will be curious if it stays as just a dead zone service. Interesting the wireless providers would sign on for this which could ultimately challenge them in the future.

[woah]

There's a limitation to how much data can be carried by a certain radio wavelength. Adding more satellites within a given coverage area doesn't help, because they will just interfere with each other. Using antennas with narrower beams or beamforming and also launching more satellites could help, but there are limits, since you start to compromise on the ability for clients to connect.

I don't remember the exact figures, but the limit might be somewhere around 1 gb/s per 50 square miles or something. Contrast this with fiber fed cell towers. The fiber can carry unimaginable amounts of data, and data capacity keeps going up as endpoints are upgraded without laying new fiber. The tower's transmissions only cover a small area which can be a disadvantage but also has the advantage that it does not interfere with other nearby towers. Towers can be upgraded as well. For example, a tower might start with an omnidirectional antenna to cover the entire area. As more people start using it, it can transition to using a large number of sector antennas in a circle, each only covering a few degrees.

So, looking at it from the perspective of subscriber per square mile, satellites have a hard limit, and it's quite low, while terrestrial wireless has almost no limit.

This means that there is a certain subscriber density where satellite makes more sense, and a certain subscriber density where terrestrial makes more sense. The subscriber density where satellite makes more sense is probably far lower than you might expect.

[foxyv]

They are not cheaper unfortunately. Almost by an order of magnitude. Even though you need far fewer of them.

[trident5000]

Where is this info from? Hard for me to fathom this. Surely digging up ground to lay wires with lots of labor and materials is more expensive...at least I would think.

[charles_f]

I'm wondering who's gonna be the competition though, whether that will compete with regular phone providers or the likes of iridium

[trident5000]

It seems to be traditional wireless providers from what Ive been hearing Musk say. I could be mistaken though.