this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I still think Starlink can be a great service for rural areas, but it seems they need to improve their capabilities first. Which in a way makes a chicken-egg scenario. If they expand servers to handle all those people, they should be eligible for a grant, but they don’t wanna do it until they get the grant.
It's just not a sustainable idea. To expand service, they need to launch even more satellites. Which degrade and fall down after a year. The only reason it could exist thus far is because the US taxpayer paid for it with subsidies like this.
America has problems with getting cable companies to actually lay cable after giving them money to do that, which is a separate thing. But at least if you get cable laid, it is in the ground providing service for hundreds of years instead of 1 year.
Also not only would they need more satellites, but satellites more densely in any area with multitude of customers. Which eventually hits RF interference saturation.
Radio signal has only so much bandwidth in certain amount of frequency band. Infact being high up and far away makes it worse. Since more receivers hit the beam of the satellite transmission. One would have to acquire more radio bands, but we'll unused global satellite transmission bands don't grow in trees.
Tighter transmitters and better filtering receivers can help, but usually at great expense and in the end eventually one hits a limit of "can't cheat laws of physics"