AFAICT that's exactly what Starlink is trying to do. Their satellites are in a low enough orbit to provide sufficient bandwidth for light web browsing, and they certainly have enough satellites to provide reliable coverage (by satellite standards).

Thing is, satcom is still much more expensive, much slower, and much more power-hungry than what folks have gotten used to with broadband home internet, LTE, and 5G. I have the feeling that it will always be that way - it takes a lot more power to blast a signal into space than it does to send it to a tower down the street, or to the router in your living room. The section of the general population that is willing to make such huge tradeoffs in exchange for truly global coverage is quite small. Militaries and certain types of businesses love it, though.

You already can.

Tons of people driving the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina are using Starlink now - it works flawlessly no matter what country you're in.

Same for people driving around Africa, across Central Asia, etc.

Pro Tip - order it in a country like Mexico and the monthly fee is way lower.

That sounds like an absolute distopian nightmare and the last person on earth that I want to be running this service is Elon Musk. In general I find it horrendous how a single american company can pollute the night sky for every human being in the world, whether they can use their services or not. Technologically I'm in awe of what Starlink achieves, it's an incredible feat - and yet I still think it's a travesty that it's allowed to exist at all.

Most are in a five year orbit. This means that if SpaceX loses control of the satellite it will deorbit in five years due to atmospheric drag. Under control they deorbit within hours. They plan on switching to a one year orbit in the future.

They have purposefully deorbitted hundreds of satellites. They had a couple of early satellites deorbit naturally without control, but all starlinks currently orbiting are under control.

Starlinks are designed to burn up in atmosphere. On deorbit they do not reach the Earth.

I imagine Starlinks are like other Musk products and get updates multiple times per month, but that's a guess.

SpaceX has little reason to thwart any competition since it's just creating more demand for their services, thus in theory helping to reduce the cost of putting mass into orbit, funding future efforts and further solidifying their position as the industry leader.

Not that SpaceX could/would thwart competition since it would be met with a great deal of pressure from the gov.

When applying for permits, it makes sense to vastly overshoot your actual goal, it gives you negotiation reserves.

I'm pretty sure if a global vote was held on the question of "Would you like to have 10,000 satellites launched so you have the option of paying a US company for broadband anywhere in the world?", the vote outcome would be a firm 'No'.

It's less than half, but not by that much.

Starlink has satellites in several orbits, but at least one I know they're using is 319mi (they have approval for shells as low as 210mi, but I'm not sure if they're using that yet). A human's central vision is about 60 degrees (NOT the same thing as your full field of view). The radius of the earth ranges between 3950 and 3963 miles. I'll call it 3955 for our purposes.

(3955+319) gives us a radius of 4274 miles. Throw in that 17,000mph (27,000 km/hr) figure, one can determine that a Starlink satellite moves at about 3.78 degrees per minute with respect to the center of Earth.

To make things simpler, (again, back of the envelope), I'm going to calculate this using basic trig. The radius of the earth is much larger than the satellite's orbit, so this shouldn't skew the numbers too much.

Imagine standing on the ground and looking straight upwards into the night sky. At a distance of 319 miles, your 60 degree field of view covers a plane that's 2⋅319⋅tan(30°) = 368 miles wide.

This plane cuts a chord through the satellite's circular orbit. Those two points are 2⋅arcsin(368 / (2⋅4274)) = 4.93 degrees apart.

Knowing both the angle between the two points on the chord and the angular speed of the satellite with respect to Earth, we can determine that the Starlink satellite will spend roughly 1.3 minutes (1 minute and 18 seconds) within your central field of view. So, the satellite is definitely not fast enough for the naked eye to miss it, assuming it's big and/or bright enough.

Normally, you'd be right about a picnic table hundreds of miles away. That's tiny and you'd never see it, no matter what speed it was moving at. However, satellites are highly reflective and because they're sitting high above Earth, they can be hit by sunlight even during the night. Maybe(?) they wouldn't be visible in the problem I just laid out, where you're looking straight up, but turn your head a bit and it becomes feasible.

Throw in the fact that there are thousands of them all marching in a spherical parade around Earth, and it's totally reasonable that they'd be visible from the ground. In fact, there's a whole website dedicated to this very phenomenon: https://findstarlink.com/. If we didn't have so much light pollution on the ground in my neck of the woods, the website indicates that I could see them a couple times a night.

My understanding was the intent is to serve traffic across the mesh and only downlink it at the closest terrestrial point, which should allow for significantly more.

Because not every country has widespread consumer-grade 5G and fiber-optic infrastructure set up? I swear some of you here live in a bubble and don't consider that there's an entire world much bigger than just your <insert place of residence>.

I live in that kind of a country in the Balkan, and the overwhelming majority of people here get way less than 100mbs download speed in their homes, no matter how much they're willing to pay for better internet, because at the end of the day, there is no infrastructure, and the monopoly (*technically* a duopoly) of isps don't see any reason whatsoever to broaden their infrastructure

Previously I subscribed to a local ISP that only supported 5mb/s, then one of the large Telcos (Bell) offered a 4G wireless internet, but it only had 100GB cap. With the overage charges I incurred the cost was greater than Starlink and then they oversold the service so it was nearly unusable from the time the kids got home from school until about 9pm.

Starlink has been rock solid for me, it's been well worth the money.

Also, 100mbps internet is not achievable via normal means for most of the worlds population. Your view appears fairly narrow.

Starlink really is a game-changer for people who don't have other good Internet options. And there are a lot of them even if they don't live on a montaintop in Wyoming someplace. Can everyone in rural locations afford broadband at all? No. But Starlink is actually pretty competitive with equivalent broadband offerings.

I am a long way from being a Musk fanboy but Starlink is genuinely extremely useful for a lot of people.

Do you think being within 100km of a city guarantees good service? I used to live literally right on the outskirts of a major British city, the best internet I could get was 10mbps ADSL, not because there was nothing better in the area but because the local exchange was oversubscribed and no one could connect us with no estimate of when a space might free up. Also mobile signal was really crappy because it was in a valley.

But even ignoring that weird edge case - plenty of small villages around here where internet is really poor and there are no 5G masts anywhere nearby. A friend of mine has starlink because the only other option was 36mbps through BT, even though he lives few miles out of a city.

>>. At least the night sky was ruined for a billionaire's useless constellation.

On that we 10000% agree.