Yeah. Looks like more oriented towards military use, but I thought there already were similar solutions in use by militaries, albeit for much simpler radio-communication (like analogue voice and stuff).
So, not really a StarLink alternative for everything StarLink provides, but something that should reduce the need for StarLink, in certain scenarios.
For residential use?
Hmm, well if you consider it as "community use", maybe it can work out.
Perhaps one station can have connection to the Internet using Fibre and it can act as a bridge for the "peer-net" made using multiple of these, owned by each person.
How useful/viable it turns out to be, will depend upon pricing and stability. I can think of the following:
- if buildings are fixed, fibre is better
- in non-disaster prone areas, fibre is better, even given the peer-peer model
- for areas with frequent earthquakes, this can be used (similar to WiMAX?)
- this can be better than WiMAX, if the peers' bandwidth requirements are less than what a single node can provide, meaning they can act as a node for others farther away from the server
- if people want to move around while using this, then this makes more sense
- you will have to factor in additional costs of running relay nodes on drones
- in plains, drones having an extendable tripod should be good enough and would require a much smaller number of relays
- in forested areas, you can have drones perch on top of trees. Either way, prevent requiring continuous hovering
- need to worry about both, wildlife-safety and wildlife-proofing.
- the relay nodes will still require battery-recharges, so that needs to be take in account