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Comment by bryananderson | Hacker News Reader

The SpaceX ground stations are meant to be consumer owned (about the size of a pizza box).

There is a difference between the CPE (what you use to get the service) and what SpaceX uses to sink your traffic into the global internet. And in fact there is exactly zero incentive for somebody other than SpaceX to run the ground stations.

On the other hand it is completely possible that SpaceX's ground stations will use HW that is similar to their CPE box and thus they can build ridiculous amount of such ground stations (ie. at every IXP or so, althought the "lightweith non-IP transport" proclamation somehow precludes doing that)

That would be an interesting model for the ground stations. Everybody else builds large and capable ground stations with big dishes. Iridium for example provides global phone and slow data coverage using only one public ground station, but also uses a completely different band to talk with the ground stations vs. the handhelds.

Iridium used to have multiple gateways. I think Arizona, Italy, Middle East, and Asia. Do they only use Arizona now?

According to this Motherboard article [1] from Jan 27, 2018, only the Tempe, AZ gateway handles non-military traffic, with the US DOD and Russia operating the two other (military) gateways. I can't remember if the other gateways were shutdown during Iridium's bankruptcy.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d34bmk/iridium-ne...

You (and the parent of my comment) are completely correct; I misunderstood.

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