because consumer grade CPE terminals need to be so small (because of hardware cost and economics), link budgets suck and less complex modulations must be used. As compared to serious 1.8 meter and larger VSATs. Show me a consumer grade VSAT that's using 16APSK/32APSK and the correspondingly higher bps/Hz efficiency that can be achieved with big, expensive satellite earth station gear used for dedicated 1:1 links.
the aggregate throughput of a geostationary satellite is greatly reduced if you start using tons of tiny VSATs on it. Go look at how much actual capacity is available in a 15 MHz chunk of Ku transponder capacity (even with a 51dBm EIRP hot spot beam), used with an iDirect evolution series linecard at the hub end, that is populated by a bunch of cheap 1.2 meter compression molded fiberglass dishes with 3W/4W class BUCs on them. How many Mbps is that? Not a lot.
> Every residential (and even many business) connectivity option is oversubscribed.
the aggregate throughput capacity of a single CMTS port on a DOCSIS3 or DOCSIS3.1 network segment is equivalent to a significant portion of the entire capacity of a geostationary satellite serving consumers. one CMTS port can serve hundreds of (yes, oversubscribed) 200 to 1000 Mbps class residential end users. One 10GbE circuit feeding a 2U rackmount sized GPON OLT can serve a ridiculous number of end user customers. It's oversubscribed but not in such a way that individual users see latency increases during peak hours (unless somebody has really fucked up their network). With the CMTS example we're talking about things that regularly achieve 1024QAM to 4096QAM modulation on copper wireline plant using the RF channels that previously would have been analog TV.
wireline is oversubscribed? yes. I could show you traffic charts from a 175-suite condominium building where every unit is wired with symmetric gigabit 1000BaseT to the home, that has an 80% take rate of subscribers. The whole building has a single 10GbE uplink and everyone is perfectly happy. Because of course not everyone tries to use the whole capacity of anything all the time. But when you start getting into the wildly high oversubscription ratios needed to make geostationary consumer grade VSAT stuff work economically, it becomes a very poor end user experience.
> If you're saying that satellite is a shitty option, well, I think you'd find that some people disagree with you on that.
I'm saying geostationary consumer grade satellite stuff is a shitty option and should always be the choice of last resort when anything else exists, due to its unavoidable poor economics and aggregate capacity.
I have a lot more optimism that starlink will have the real world throughput needed to be a viable option for rural broadband. Because the link budgets are much better with small antennas and small tx poweer electronics, due to the LEO orbit. And the much lower latency. I think people who believe starlink will replace their 800 Mbps comcast DOCSIS3 32x8 connection or GPON last mile gigabit connection are not fully informed. Properly implemented wireline networks will always have a great deal more throughput at a much lower deployment cost. What Starlink will kill is crappy consumer grade VSATs and sub-75Mbps class terrestrial PtMP WISPs.