121–124 of 124 posts
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Launching LEO satellites is a different capability than shooting down LEO satellites.
Launching something into orbit is much harder than intercepting something because to intercept you don't need to reach orbital velocities. You can just go up and boom. The velocity of the target does the rest. Tracking it really isn't such a hard thing these days.
These aren’t capabilities Iran has. Certainly not anymore.
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lol no. There are probably 50-100 million potential customers. The rural farmer in India isn't going to buy Starlink.
Every analyst ever said cell phones wouldn’t take off across Africa because there isn’t enough money. They were all completely wrong.
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Spectrum contention is going to be insane in D2D. Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.
For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.