Starlink's Dynamic Pricing Illustrates The Capacity Limits of Satellite Technology
Starlink is introducing congestion pricing in rural America in places like Kansas and Missouri despite a 10,000 satellite constellation. There is only one credible explanation: capacity shortages. Moreover, adding satellites will not fix the problem long term as I show below. Enormous Satellite Constellations Yield Only A Trickle of Throughput Per Square Kilometer Starlink's V3 satellite can transmit a terabit per second to Earth. Assume generously that Musk has 42,000 of them four or give years in the future. That's 42 petabits of download capacity. The average person or even the business community will be fooled into thinking this is enormous capacity. Assume it is evenly distributed over the earth's surface of 520 million square kilometers for sake of simplicity. That equals only 82 megabits per square kilometer. Now you can place more satellites in certain orbits to target more densely populated areas. But this is not a fix because a V3 transmit beam has a radius of 7 k...