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Comment by barbegal | Hacker News Reader

This is only a dozen users per active starlink satellite. I wonder how many customers each satellite can actually support in terms of both available bandwidth and the ability for the phased arrays on the satellite to target the customer. I can't really see how Spacex will scale their system to reach the millions of customers they need to cover the costs of launching and maintaining all those satellites.

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They don't have satellite-to-satellite links yet, so to serve a customer the satellite also has to be able to see a downlink base station below it at the same time, and there's only a handful of those in one geographic region.

If they doubled the number of base stations in a new area (with satellite coverage) they would double the number of customers they could serve right now. So the constraint at the moment is mainly the number of base stations. The thing is once they have the sat-to-sat laser links working, they will be able to scale up with a lot fewer base stations, so there's no point deploying masses of base stations right now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

They are hoping to launch roughly 600 per Starship launch with the launch itself eventually costing roughly 2M. Don’t know how much each satellite costs.

> This is only a dozen users per active starlink satellite.

Most of the users are in the northern US at present. Satellites passing over that area will be supporting far more users.

It's literally still in testing?

GP is not questioning the feasibility of Starlink, yes you can make it work, yes you can provide 60Mbps links. But there is physical limit per satellite, so all of this goes out the window beyond maybe a few million users?

If you create all this infrastructure (with the impact it has) to then just serve a couple million people then this service will be unaffordable for mortals and limited to the wealthy and most likely the military. [0]

[0]https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-ass...

There is (practically) no limit to how many satellites you can put in place. You just position the next satellite a bit up-north and the dishes adjust their position.

Practically even LEO ain't "unlimited" space, theoretically an oversaturation of objects in LEO could lead to Kessler syndrome [0]

Practically the presence of Starlight satellites already has an impact on the work of astronomers, an issue that will only get worse as more of them are sent up [1].

That's not to belittle how cool the whole thing is, but it's kind of disheartening how we've already managed to pollute pretty much every place on the planet, and are now on our way to even polluting the space around our planet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

[1] https://teachingkidsnews.com/2020/02/03/are-too-many-satelli...

Kessler syndrome might start to be a problem once they reach a billion satellites or so. Space is big, all of these satellites have active control, and if a couple lose active control the orbit is so low they will deorbit in a couple of years.

Kessler syndrome would destroy SpaceX, so they're more aware of it than random internet people.

As for light pollution, see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036269

Wifi can only serve one computer at a time, but that doesn't make it expensive. You won't want to use Starlink if you have other options. It's a surprisingly nice service compared to existing satellite providers, but most people will prefer fiber if they can get it. Fiber is faster and most people won't care that they could get slightly better latency by using Starlink. The people most likely to use Starlink are in rural locations where they are less likely to have decent internet available.

Are you asking a question or making a statement?

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