LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don’t specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 down/up with latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren’t reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some (I vaguely recall something like 40-60% have met it?), so it’s not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Edit: I think my 40-60 number is also about a year old, so its probably a little higher now.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don’t specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 down/up with latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren’t reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some (I vaguely recall something like 40-60% have met it?), so it’s not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Edit: I think my 40-60 number is also about a year old, so its probably a little higher now.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.