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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Great, but the overwhelming majority of money is made from the place people actually live. Those places are called cities. Only about a few % of earth are built on, and even among those the top 1% is where most people live.

Don't get me wrong, that fucking great business, but its not 'replacing terrestrial ISP' level great.

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They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines back in the day. Based on Starlink's revenue doubling year on year, and a six fold increase since 2022, I don't think anyone really knows what the upper bounds for global access is yet. And traditional telcos are usually limited to a region whereas Starlink is global. Just the top 20 global telcos alone are almost $2 trillion in market cap and $1.35 trillion in revenue. Starlink has captured less than 1% of that revenue to date.

>They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines

Did they? I don't really remember that tbh.

my most altruistic view : they said it through actions.

Rural areas were the last areas to join the mobile networks.

This is just a practical thing though; why would you build a tower for a community of 900 people when there are still gaps in the major metropolitan areas? It can't all happen simultaneously regardless of how badly we wish it could.

McKinsey estimated the global market for cellphones would be 900,000 units in 2000.

They were off by 100 million.

Even until the 90s some telcos believed that cell usage would never eclipse landlines which would remain the base of their business. It sounds ridiculous today because cell numbers outnumber landlines almost ten to one and have been dominant for over two decades.

They did. I worked in telecommunications from the late 90s until 2016. The death of the landline and dominance of mobile was a genuine surprise to the industry. The iPhone was the knockout blow.

Absolutely no one said that.

There were a lot of people back in the early '90s who thought cell service would never be widely adopted because of the cost. It was clear you didn't need a mobile phone -- we'd all gotten long just fine without one.

I worked at Radio Shack in 1995 shortly after carriers started subsidizing phones aggressively and you could “buy one for penny”. They were selling like crazy.

Just some quick Googling says that cellphone penetration went from 1% in 1990 to 50% by 1999.

The Motorola Startec was introduced in 1996 and clones came quickly thereafter and were all the rage

I think that's the point. Nobody in the 80s or early 90s understood how quickly it would grow by 1995.

Although it’s also the case that people like me owned cell phones for quite a while but didn’t use them to any material degree especially for personal uses for a while.

Per minute costs were expensive, roaming from your local city took a lot of work, they were bulky bag phones and you still had to pay separate long distance charges, I’m not surprised.

Sprint changed that in the late 90s where all calls were 10 cents a minute anywhere you were calling from and too and you stayed on their network.

Exactly. I eventually bought one and then an other and chose a calling area that was most likely to correspond with people I might communicate with on trips and the like but it was backup/emergency use. Not something you used personally day to day or even maybe week to week.

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