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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

On top of the points made by q3k, about this being a US centric issue, being projected as a global issue, why do you believe this implementation will be able to deliver global pervasive internet?

The obejective is noble but can you provide any realistic data or estimates of how this infrastructure can scale to more than a few million users and _still_ be high bandwith. Beyond that your bandwith will go down as you add more users.

The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).

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This (it’s only for rich people) is silly. North Carolina officials are already planning for Starlink terminals to provide rural internet hotspots to help with folks who need good internet due to COVID-19 school closures.

Actual rich people can afford to put in fiber or line of site wherever they are. $100,000 or whatever, doesn’t matter. This is for the regular people in rural areas.

Seriously, has no one making these claims ever talked to someone whose best internet is geosynchronous satellite? Do they think only the very rich live in rural areas?

> On top of the points made by q3k, about this being a US centric issue, being projected as a global issue, why do you believe this implementation will be able to deliver global pervasive internet?

Rural internet access is absolutely not an US-centric issue, many parts of the world have much worse infrastructure. Being opposed to new technologies because "I already have fast internet" is unbelievably narrow minded.

1) Why do you think people in subsaharan Africa, for example, won't be able to use it?

2) The only limitation on bandwidth (and thus users) is the number of satellites in orbit. If the constellation bandwidth is saturated, launch more satellites and you get more bandwidth.

3) I guess you'll just ignore the use cases for the tens of millions of non-rich people who literally can't get decent internet because it doesn't exist where they live?

Is there any expectation that a local in Africa or sea would be able to afford starlink rates? I haven't seen pricing information yet, but I'd be very surprised if that was the case.

See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293352

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