On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
My most serious concern about Starlink as a system remains the fact that it puts a pipe between the end user and the first network hop (the satellite) that is in principle very difficult to scale: There's only so much extra spectrum one can use, spatial diversity (beamforming) has limited potential, and unlike in cellular networks, you can't really shrink the cell size to accommodate more end users through frequency re-use as your cell size is determined to a good part by orbital altitude. That all but rules out the scaling effects that CDNs have brought to the rest of the Internet, which keep orders of magnitude worth of traffic off long distance cables. There simply isn't an obvious place in LEO topology to put a cache that'll produce a decent number of hits while being able to serve this content to end users through a large collective bandwidth.The interesting question for me is how much we can scale Starlink and its up-and-coming cousins from the few million users Starlink has now. To 100 million? To 200 million? Half a billion even?
If you are in an area where the cell companies are investing in smaller cells, then you are not in a Starlink target area. There are large areas with poor or non-existant cell coverage.
Outside the US, scaling of Starlink can happen just by providing coverage to locations that don't yet have coverage with no additional satellites.
In terms of scaling existing areas, larger antennas can reduce cell size, you can have more than one satellite cover a given cell, they are looking at eventually having lower satellites, which again will let them reduce the cell size.
David Lang
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