Starlink Is a Big Deal
><i>"Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live."</i><p>this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection, that's... one city? And that doesn't account for transmission between the satellites or satellites not in range and so on, and the fact that those satellites are short-lived and need to be replaced.<p>How is this supposed to be economical or scale compared to regular terrestrial networks?<p>And one point on the social impact. We have heard this idea that you just need to 'connect people' over the internet to somehow give every disadvantaged place economic opportunity for decades now. This isn't how the real world works. Everyone still runs to California/their national equivalent You can count the areas where the VC money goes on one hand. Putting a satellite in the sky over Siberia isn't going to upend the social realities of geography.