The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn’t have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn’t really a helpful argument to make today.

How much coverage do we want? Global or just the continent+ a bit more?

I admit I don’t know much about orbital physics, but I don’t see how you can have consistent coverage of Europe 24 hours per day and low pings comparable to Starlink without also covering the entire globe. Geosynchronous or sun synchronous orbits require a minimum ping of 240ms, round trip.

Eutelsat has geosynchronous orbits, which allows them to provide service over a much larger area per satellite and doesn’t require very many satellites to serve a consistent geographical area as the earth rotates and the satellites orbit the earth.

Problem is, though, geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km altitude. Light travels at 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. So any signal takes 120ms to get to the satellite, and 120 ms to return. Any signal is going to have a 240ms latency at a minimum, and that’s just physics.

Starlink satellites have an altitude closer to 600 km. Light only takes about 2ms to get to that altitude, and 2ms to return. So the satellites add only about 4ms, which makes for easier and more seamless communication.

In order to compete with starlink for most typical Internet applications, it’ll require a bunch more satellites orbiting at much lower altitudes.