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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

Google suggests 150K minimum for a cell tower. Another search suggests that a Starlink satellite costs one million dollars, based on the assumption of a Falcon 9 launch and does not include any improvement in costs.

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.

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But cell towers require leasing land. This page says the average land lease is $45,000/year: https://blog.sior.com/cell-tower-leases-add-big-value-with-l...

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.

According to the article, cell phones in cities are NOT a use case for Starlink. (I don't know if the problem is power or antenna size.)

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.

That cell tower only covers a small geographical area, and you have to physically maintain it along with paying property taxes. Also, that cell tower can't peer with other cell towers to route trans continental packets.

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.

A starlink satellite only covers a small area. That's why they need 4,000 just to provide bare minimum service.

Google says there are ~300,000 cell towers in the United States. Napkin math says the satellites appear to cover about an order of magnitude more ground.

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.

Cell towers aren't a great comparison. They tend to heavily lump them in dense areas, and you have many companies who've built infrastructure in the same place to get to that number. SpaceX doesn't have as much control over covering more dense areas, short of launching more satellites.

Wireless backhaul is not uncommon between (among?) cell towers. Probably a cell tower won't have as many other towers in LoS, on the other hand, equipment on towers is easier to debug.

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