It would be surprising if speeds were not getting worse. Less than 10% of the sats are up. Probably most of the tricks to minimize wasted bandwidth aren't deployed yet, waiting on enough volume for them to be useful, and edge services to integrate.
How does starlink compares to the space shuttle program regarding cost per launch? Regarding peak capacity the program was able to do a launch per month with only a few navets. I'm kind of convinced that starlink is actually inferior on most metrics it's simply that space navets are banned because of irrational aversion despite their excellent track record (over 150 successful launch, among the two main accidents, one was ridiculous (inept management not listening to the unique conditions (launch colder than anyone before it)) so a cause that has no real reason to ever happen again in history. As for Columbia, i wonder if the insulating product they putted on the wing could have been made safer. There must be a reason why it only cause issues for a minority of flights. Moreover when it induce damage, they coulf always throw the navet and return manually or stay on the ISS.
Starlink's sats are 30-60x closer to earth than other satellite providers (500-1000km vs 35,000km), so their coverage area is lower as well. In that sense they are competing more with mobile telecom (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc).<p>As Starlink's speed lowers they stop being as competitive with mobile data service, which can have fairly low latency (5G is in the 20ms realm, Starlink in 40-100ms?).<p>But it always depends on where you are to pick the most performant service.
It makes sense that as the number of customers grows, the median speed would go down. That just seems like a general scaling cost, even if the number of satellites (and downlinks!) per customer remained the same. Especially since you can select the sites with the least issues into your beta program first.
Stupid Question: Wouldnt it be better for starlink, to be actually linked- as in fiber-optic tethered together satellite constellations?<p>Thanks for the answer:
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