this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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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.