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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

It appears you are doubting that they will eventually launch their 2.0 satellites with an order of magnitude more bandwidth. It's not like they haven't delivered in the past...

The constellation is still growing quickly, they just passed 3000 launched Starlink satellites. By the time they go past the 9.000 satellites or so they should have Starship ready and kick their launch volume into overdrive. Have the 30,000 extra satellites (on top of the 12,000 already approved ones) even been approved yet?

> Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.

What does that even mean? There is no reason to believe they can't launch enough powerful satellites to reach faster speeds in those rural areas.

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Not getting it? Putting faster routers on the satellites has absolutely no effect on the radio bandwidth available between sat and terminal.

If each new satellite can put down more spot beams, you can cover more cells for longer. With the spectrum they have, they could put 8 beams on a cell with 100% duty cycle, which is probably around 3.2-4Gbps.

Use narrower beams and you increase the availble bandwidth. Same as using more wireless access points using lower transmission power each.

They’ve already applied to the FCC for the 2Ghz spectrum. They’re already launching the larger 1.5 satellites that include lasers to limit ground stations. They just had a successful test fire of a starship with the engines mounted this week.

What makes you doubt the company that made reusable rockets that land on boats and reflux 13+ times won’t do this? The ENTIRE industry said it was impossible but it was fully within the realm of physics. They pulled it off because it was possible.

NOBODY said it was impossible.

People doubted they could make it pay, but the US kept handing over money until it did.

Oh Starlink is still losing massive amounts of money. There’s absolutely no feasible way they’re profitable at this stage.

That said. I’m sure the US Department of Defense will effectively write SpaceX a blank check after seeing how quickly they switched to spread spectrum frequency hopping to prevent Russian jamming of comms in Ukraine.

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