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Comment by crb002 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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