this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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The limited bandwidth of practical microwaves shared by everyone in the footprint of a satellite, which is thousands of square kilometres. More satellites help, but since it hears the signals from every person on earth in its footprint, even if that person is connecting to a different satellite, there are limited gains when you reach the point where they have a lot of overlap - literally limited by geometry. Compare that with fiber, which allows for virtually unlimited unshared service bandwidth that can get faster as it’s built out and becomes more popular.
Beam steering largely mitigates most of these problems. Fiber is definitely more scalable, but also far more expensive (somehow...) to provide last mile to the entire planet.
From orbit, whole regions are within a few degrees arc from the perspective of orbit. It’s not enough to overcome what is fundamentally a business hype problem. Starlink is wonderful tech for remote outposts, boats, disaster areas, emergency service workers, and things like that, but those customers would never pay enough to be profitable, so they have marketed it as general purpose internet, so it will get slower the more people sign up.
Yes, with the current network this is true. I guess it feels like you're discounting the future growth of the constellation
More birds in orbit just hear more and more overlapping signals from the huge ground area they are over, and so share bandwidth. There’s a reason cell towers get lower and lower the more dense the population.