Awesome. My wireless bill is too high and competition never hurt. I would think satellites are way cheaper than setting up ground based towers and therefore will offer cheaper service.
train : plane :: land line : cell phone :: terrestrial : satellite
The big challenge/opportunity will come when a non-US player arrives, like Thuraya after Iridium and the NSA can't slurp down all telephony.
Even if they were cheaper, a satellite is limited to 7Mbits/s. A 5G tower can handle 10Gbits/s. And you don't even have to price a cell tower by the kilogram.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1742396904619581642
> Note, this only supports ~7Mb per beam and the beams are very big, so while this is a great solution for locations with no cellular connectivity, it is not meaningfully competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks.
And to think he often overstates things.
A modern cell tower can handle a lot of throughput overall because it can slice a cell site into a lot of small sectors and handle a lot of clients in it. A single satellite covers many, many square miles even with a very, very narrow beam. Plus you're just dealing with vastly different SNR, power levels, speed differentials, etc.
It probably isn't physically possible to do phone with Starlink high speed service. The dedicated antenna would be better than existing 4G/5G but small size would be a problem. Also, the Starlink antennas depend on having good view of the size.
Finally, the market is tiny of people wandering in the wilderness who want high-speed data. Starlink competes with itself since its service can be used for remote camps; there are rumors of a smaller antenna. Starlink even makes it easier to setup wilderness cell towers and microcells at house.
I don't remember the exact figures, but the limit might be somewhere around 1 gb/s per 50 square miles or something. Contrast this with fiber fed cell towers. The fiber can carry unimaginable amounts of data, and data capacity keeps going up as endpoints are upgraded without laying new fiber. The tower's transmissions only cover a small area which can be a disadvantage but also has the advantage that it does not interfere with other nearby towers. Towers can be upgraded as well. For example, a tower might start with an omnidirectional antenna to cover the entire area. As more people start using it, it can transition to using a large number of sector antennas in a circle, each only covering a few degrees.
So, looking at it from the perspective of subscriber per square mile, satellites have a hard limit, and it's quite low, while terrestrial wireless has almost no limit.
This means that there is a certain subscriber density where satellite makes more sense, and a certain subscriber density where terrestrial makes more sense. The subscriber density where satellite makes more sense is probably far lower than you might expect.
Satellites are cheaper per square mile, but they can only provide a sliver of service when they're covering such a large range.
If satellites were competitive anywhere with moderate density, a simple extra-big tower would be even more competitive. But we need more than that to split up users into smaller groups.
A simple google search for cost to launch a satellite comes back with "between $10 and $400 million dollars". And cost to build a cell tower being "around $250,000."
If it costs $100k to run a mile of fiber, which would be very high, then you could run about 95 miles to a new tower before you even get to the low end of satellite costs.
This means, for the cost of a single satellite, you can run about 13 macrocells. In addition, the infrastructure for those cells can last much longer and maintenance is much cheaper.
The only place that satellites makes sense is in remote areas where people aren't clustered as closely. Satellite is great at covering vast swaths of land with fewer subscriptions. So an area that would require 13 or more macrocells or an absurd amount of fiber optics to service a couple hundred people is perfect for StarLink.
The equation will change a lot if or when Falcon Heavy starts operating though. Then we will be able to blot out the stars with relatively inexpensive satellites. But I foresee StarLink using ground cells in denser areas anyways to reduce space traffic since you can't just cluster the satellites over a specific area. Probably they will just rent out the nodes to existing providers to expand cell coverage.
So the days of my carrier forcing me to buy a new phone every few years are over? Sweet. About time they knocked it off with this constant infrastructure churn.
(FYI Falcon Heavy is operational, I think you mean Starship.)