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It will happen over time



> It will happen over time

I'm optimistic.

I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).


That's still many orders of magnitude too little.

We're currently talking data rates on the order of (optimistically) 5 Mbit/s for a cell with a diameter of 15 square miles, i.e. something like 0.1 Mbit/s per km^2.

In very rural areas (which is the use case!), that's infinitely better than nothing, but anywhere people live, this is effectively nothing, and there is currently no way around ground-based infrastructure.




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