Are cellular towers the next landlines?

ssg.dev

3 points·sedatk··7 comments

> How long until base stations are replaced with satellites?

The day that people no longer need to use phones in buildings, vehicles, valleys, forests, or in urban environments amongst tall buildings.

You should have kept reading :)

I did. Mesh networking is not a solution to this because you’re just dividing a small amount of bandwidth amongst an ever increasing number of users while adding latency and reducing reliability and reducing battery life, while making sparsely populated coverage impossible.

The satellite infra is trivial to upgrade because the satellites are constantly being replaced anyway as I mentioned in the article. So, capacity until the last mile isn't a problem. Splitting to wireless devices is also what we do at homes today.

I think the whole thing seems like a solveable problem, and it will be solved.

Let this be a reminder for the future :)

I'll take my fiber over anything wireless and I don't see this changing

The physics just doesn't work out for satellite based internet.

For home internet, yes. Nothing prevents you from keeping that. But it doesn't work for mobile. Or, maybe, with better Wifi roaming mechanisms in place, that can also work like Ethernet backhaul but on a city scale.

> So, capacity until the last mile isn't a problem.

It absolutely is a problem, because there is a there is a physical limit to the amount of information that can be carried over a bandwidth and noise limited channel. A satellite link is both.

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

This cannot be solved by simply lobbing more satellites into space.

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