For Starlink, launching satellites are both incredibly expensive and hard to maintain. And likely they will have much lower bandwidth than cell towers, and the uplink hardware will be much more expensive than cellular hardware.
So, it's an order of magnitude increase in costs if we assume that a cell tower have the same capabilities and do the same thing as a starlink satellite, which it does not, since a cell tower is just a structure you can lease to host equipment on.
I wonder how much is the capital expenditure is for infrastructure spending versus the number of cell towers?
According to google, there are 307,626 towers in the United States. Another source gave me 55.71 billion expenditure for calendar year 2018 which also includes maintenance. Divide the expenditure by towers gives me 181,096 USD spent per tower.
So, 350,000 dollars versus 1,000,000 dollars. Hmm.
Not to mention how much will DOD subsidize their own sub-constellation for SkyNet to prime the cashflow? I'm guessing at least $50 billion.
But more accurately, it’s a question of how many birds are in the sky above you at a given moment, and how narrowly you want to focus their antenna based on the desired bandwidth availability per square mile. It’s the same idea with place cell sites closer together at lower power, except I imagine the satellite constellation design can’t be tailored around specific dense environments, and rather will provide a relatively constant global density, or constant bandwidth densities at certain latitudes.
Starlink satellites are expected to have a 5 year lifespan, so maybe tack on another $250,000 to the cell tower for a cost comparison.
Also, Starlink satellites have to forward traffic to/from ground stations that are close to the area the Starlink satellite is serving. I don't see the costs of those stations accounted for anywhere here.
Of course the problem with this is that there's relatively not many people who live in the middle of nowhere because most people want to live near civilization. So I am doubtful that starlink will be an economic success.
Now I can hop on to any number of free webcams in Vientiane and check out the happenings where I used to live just for the heck of it, no questions asked, no money required.
Sometimes it still shocks me how much the world has changed in the past few decades!
Vientiane is all grown up and becoming a bit of a popular expat area. Vangvieng is super popular with backpackers and Luang Prabang is a bit of a tourist trap, but is still tiny and really beautiful. I spent about a week just hanging out in Nong Khiaw... tiny little town on the river, super relaxing.
The infrastructure is changing a lot too. Roads are becoming real roads. Chinese are moving in and building roads and hydro dams all through the country. Bought up all the land from the locals. Really a total eco disaster that nobody is talking about.
And I remember clearly there was only one English sign anywhere in the Vientiane Airport, and it was a warning before the metal detector that said 'No Guns, No Knives, No Durian' in many different languages. More than one flight to Bangkok had someone casually cleaning their rifle to pass the time, and knives were shrugged at. They Meant It when it came to trying to take a durian on the plane, though!
//
I would very much like to return and see how things have changed. Things haven't aligned to make it possible for me, yet, but it's on the list.
Here's a small gallery from the National Day parade in 1980, if you're interested: https://imgur.com/a/GRmSl