• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • If you want to be effective, you need to drift south as much as you drift north to get adequate coverage - still a circular orbit, just tilted off the equator. This causes a real problem, because northern Europe is far enough north that you have to pretty much cover the whole world, anyway. Also, the more you move from the equator, the more bands of satellites you will need to have coverage at all times. The other part in the Starlink system is the requirement for some number of base stations to connect to the internet backbones. Further iterations are reducing this need, but it will never be 0.

    What this means is, it would be cheaper for Brazil or the Middle East to have local satellite internet than it is for Europe, China, or Australia. In fact, if Europe had a low-orbit satellite internet offering, it would be more cost effective to sell it worldwide because they would be close to that just covering their own needs. Which is also the position Starlink has chosen to be in.