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Comment by TenJack | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda bummed Starlink is not going to lead to cheaper consumer internet and replace cable internet. Sounds like it is mainly for rural areas which is great but I hoped it was going to bunny hop fiber.

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Not initially, but as cost to orbit goes down and the satellite tech improves, it could become the default way over time.

Can the spectrum they are using support that many users?

I thought there was discussion of base stations. Couldn't they do 1 per apartment building or block without the density issues?

In any urban area, they'd be super oversubscribed. I haven't been following Starlink super closely lately, but IIRC each satellite is really only capable of supporting 20 users at the full advertised speed. Even though there's a handful of satellites visible from a given location at a given time, it's not enough to support urban (or perhaps even suburban) areas.

Googling this suggests we are seeing 100gbps per satellite... at 100mbps that's enough for 1000 saturated connections per satellite and a decent multiple of that number of users by oversubscribing/multiplexing. It's still not enough bandwidth to compete with city-ISPs in cities.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/duw4o4/starlink_1...

That reddit comment doesn't go into much depth, do you know if that 100gbps number is actually the sat to ground budget? IIRC, the majority of the starlink satellites' bandwidth is for sat to sat transmissions (routing data from other sats to the nearest ground station).

Edit: also IIRC, SpaceX said that Starlink will offer up plans up to 1Gbps

There are currently no sat to sat transmissions, so it's all sat to ground and ground to sat.

Sat to ground and ground to sat use different frequencies so I would guess it can do roughly that speed in both directions simultaneously. There are also separate frequencies for ground stations and for user terminals, and I believe the implication was this was for user terminals. The number was just obtained by someone implying around 20gbps on the 0.9 sats and later on someone else saying something about 4-5x the speed on these sats. It's not official or likely to be particularly accurate.

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