They mentioned backhaul, I wonder what is the upper bound of scale, will it be big enough to complement/replace submarine cables at some point.
Sats will not replace them for backhaul. The capacity isn't there. For limited emergencies sure but not for all our Netflix.
This is all great for users in poorly connected areas and that's what it's really for.
Ps: also the sat link is more for remote areas, the network is much more efficient when an uplink is available in the same area and this is also how it provides near cable-like latency. Basically a bent-pipe system. If you'd use this capability for long-distance back haul you'd need to tie up a lot of sats' capacity increasing latency and decreasing capacity overall.
There are also competitors like OneWeb (smaller, but still useful) and Kuiper (not yet running, but potentially a comparably sized project, a project of Amazon’s), so this is just getting started.
Google moonshot in action:
Alphabet is bridging the Congo River with a 20Gbps laser beam.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/alphabets-laser-inte...
Also remote cell sites can be provided with uplinks via starlink. My parents small town has 1 tower that provides everything from limited internet, cable and cell service via microwave. The community center only has internet because of it.
Dialup is almost dead everywhere, and basically useless on modern websites.
Millions of americans only have cell service as their only internet, expensive and bandwidth capped. I replaced my folks hotspot with starlink, its been great for them and when I work from their home. Teams works fine over it.
I'd also expect comcast coverage zones that exclude a few houses will be using it. And areas lacking DSL service.
What I'm looking forward to is when sats have sat to sat communications to route traffic around the world.
Good times.
A huge benefit to safety in rural and other areas without existing cell coverage.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/132035/spacex-tmobile-star...
New dishes can make better use of limited frequency resources (eg. They support polarization). So they can squeeze more users in the same bandwidth if everyone has a new dish. So at some point, they'll require everyone purchase a new dish.
And fewer hardware versions to support is less burden on the engineering team.
That is part of why I think they should be providing the dish hardware for free as part of the service... The incentives are misaligned if the user buys the dish but spacex decides when it's deprecated.
He actually uses Starlink in a major city that only has Comcast cable Internet. The service was so slow and unreliable that he was unable to work from home. He happily switched to Starlink and flipped Comcast the bird.
