Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
40,943
Let's for the moment take the proposed cellular service at face value and try to apply a little analysis to see what might work and how it might happen.
As I see it, SpaceX doesn't have much in the way of ground access but has incredibly flexible backhaul. Once there are lots of direct-to-cell (D2C) satellites flying, any phone in any uncrowded region should be able to connect directly to the network. That's pretty cool in that one can contemplate a global cellular network. But it also only addresses low-density areas.
In high-density areas, Starlink's phased-array beam-forming technology may not be able to connect to enough simultaneous users to be an actual cellular provider. Instead they're proposing a smaller number of cells will connect and will aggregate communications from multiple users. That's fine. One still might run into total bandwidth on the backhaul, but the problem of too many simultaneous users is solved.
What I find interesting is the idea that one might have a lot of these cells. If there are 100X the number of satellite aggregate upload points than a traditional carrier has cellular antennas, then each cell only needs to connect to 1% of the normal traffic for an antenna. That means, these cells only need 1% of the bandwidth for cell-to-user communications, right? So SpaceX's lack of spectrum isn't as terrible as it might be otherwise.
So is it feasible to put many more Starlink uplinks than there are cellular towers for a traditional carrier? Gemini tells me Verizon has 130,000 physical locations between macrocell and small cell nodes. Starlink currently has 2.7 million subscribers in the US - or about 20X more than Verizon cells. That suggests that SpaceX has already deployed something to the tune of 20% the amount of hardware that would be needed to have 100X the number of cells (a number I randomly selected as well). Obviously, it would have to be all-new hardware, but that scale isn't an impossible number to consider.
The final issue is the actual bandwidth of the backhaul. I'm sure we've all been in situations where our cellular strength is strong but the data crawls. That's the biggest challenge for SpaceX here. In densely populated areas, there's still just a finite amount of bandwidth that can be served by the nearby satellites. The new v3 D2C satellites can apparently manage much more than the existing ones, but I'm not sure that even that will be enough.
Oddly, this might turn out to be the cellular provider whose best coverage and bandwidth is found away from city centers.
