942
A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth (news.ubc.ca)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
213 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent