> You’re saying that thousands of starlink satellites are actualky spy satellites

No. I didn’t say that and wouldn’t say that. Read carefully because i write carefully what i mean.

You are saying that the theory as presented by bob1029 could not work. I’m saying that your argument why it couldn’t work is not persuasive.

You present two arguments in your comment. (As best as i can understand it.)

One is about the secrecy around the design and manufacturing of the satelites. You claim, without support, that most people don’t have a security clearance in the redmond starlink factory.

Satelite design and manufacturing is already very secretive. Because of ITAR and regular commercial confidentiality you won’t hear a peep about what is on the satelites. The people who design and develop the satelites would of course know the full capabilities of them, but the people manufacturing them need not know. All they need to know is that they are installing optical assemblies. Whoever asks can be told that they are for laser communication.

So the amount of people who need to know is smaller than the full work force. That workforce is already trained on secrecy, and they are practicing it. They already risk prison if they leak anything. (Without any spy satelite business, just because what they work on is ITAR controlled.) On top of that spacex is quite openly hiring for a number of positions requiring top secret clearance.

Your other argument is that if data from these hypothetical sensors would leak that would compromise the hypothetical secrecy around them. Which is true, but is a general property of all inteligence gathering. If it was not an argument against any of the other systems why would it be an argument against this one?

Secrets like this hypothetical one have a finite lifetime. You do it because you hope to gain from doing it. You keep it secret because you hope to gain more than if you didn’t keep it secret. Even if the capability becomes known to your adversaries you won’t loose all the benefits, just some.

> and the only evidence is… vibes?

Because i’m not claiming that they are spy sattelites. All i’m claiming is that your argument claiming that they are not, or couldn’t be is not persuasive. The negation of the statement “they couldn’t be spy satelites” is not “they are spy satelites”, but “they could be spy satelites”.

I hope that helps clarifying what i wrote. Happy to answer any further questions.

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient [TAM]

Insufficient for what?

> and shrinking TAM.

Starlink has made quite an impact on planning around servicing commercially non-viable or marginal customers in government and telcos where I am from. It is IMO quite likely that some existing cell towers in remote areas that are very expensive to operate and maintain will eventually be shut down. So that could actually expand the "TAM".

> The only places a terrestrial wireless provider doesn't want to serve are places that can't afford FWA even though it costs less.

No, they also don't want to serve places where it costs more.

5G fixed wireless makes sense in urban and suburban areas because a single tower can serve many customers. But in rural areas, the number of customers per tower is much lower. To be profitable, the cost to build & maintain the tower must be covered by the customers in the area. Google says a 5G tower can cost anywhere from $150k-$300k, with maintenance costs being around 10% of that per year. In rural areas, the cost is likely on the high end because power and fiber lines will be longer. Each 5G tower has a range of 5ish miles, meaning it can serve an area of 75-80 square miles. A rural county like Ferry County, Washington has 2 households per square mile. So in that county, a tower can serve 150-160 households. Assuming 100% of households are customers, that means each must pay $200-400 per year for the tower to break even after a decade. The actual numbers are fuzzier. Obviously you won't have 100% adoption, but cell towers also serve cell phones.

In comparison, each Starlink satellite costs around $1 million to manufacture and launch, and each satellite lasts at least 5 years. So cost per satellite per year is $200k. They currently have 7,600 satellites serving 7 million customers, meaning on average, each satellite serves almost 1,000 customers. At $200k per satellite per year, each customer needs to pay $200 per year for them to break even. It seems likely that launch costs will go down in the future, meaning this number will decrease.

There's also the complication that each new Starlink satellite improves coverage & bandwidth for the entire globe, while each new 5G tower improves coverage & bandwidth in a specific area. A county may have a population density of 2-4 households per square mile, but many of those households are clustered together. The less dense areas are not likely to be covered by cell towers any time soon, as it's less economically viable. Another disadvantage of cell towers is service failures. A single Starlink satellite failure means a slight degradation of service, while a single cell tower failure means everyone in the region is taken offline. In areas where both services are available, people would be likely to prefer the more reliable option.

Also where terrestrial access is denied by the local government or infra has been disabled or destroyed.

I hope Starlink can maintain enough regular non-crisis subscribers to subsidize this incredibly helpful use case.

Perhaps governments could/do pay a retainer to keep this option alive.

Once you cross a certain threshold Starlink is superior to fiber optics. That's because it has the potential to be both lower latency and more direct than terrestrial fiber as the speed of light is faster in the vacuum of space.

At a certain scale you're going to have to make the argument that laying a 10,000KM glass fiber across the ocean for 10-20% more latency is a better value than beaming it around in LEO.

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient and shrinking TAM

Planes; yachts; cruise ships; naval vessels; sea-based drilling, mining and research platforms; mines in the middle of nowhere are a shrinking TAM?

You may also be underestimating how many large rural landowners don't want to give telcos (and the relevant authorities) access to any of their land.

The two places that I'm fairly confident will never get covered by terrestrial wireless are the Pacific ocean and Atlantic ocean. Whether yacht owners, cruise ships, and airplanes are enough to sustain the business by some future time when terrestrial customers churn, who knows, but those customers aren't going to go away any time soon.

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient and shrinking TAM.

And yet, people live in those places, and you telling them that they're not economically worth serving isn't really solving their problem.

For Starlink, maybe. However, I'm sure nuclear submarines operating in the arctic (and the US Navy in general) as well as forward operating US bases, would love and be willing to pay for Starshield to cover everywhere.

Starlink has plenty of good use cases: - camper van coverage across whole countries/continents - rural farms/communities - global coverage for convenience (eg business travellers) - huge military use

...just depends if it's economically viable

Until the next war

Planes boats etc

And we are going to put that in the hands of Elon musk? Are you fucking kidding me?

The through the atmosphere bit is what brought us DLP TVs/projectors!

Also you have to consider that even top-notch lasers have a divergence (out of memory, I may be wrong by an order of magnitude) of 10mrad or so, and you are physically limited to not much better than that, so you need pretty insane powers to damage, let alone destroy, a satellite at LEO altitude.

> Cellular devices are an obvious application that needs dedicated spectrum allocation.

Not since the death of TDMA, it isn't. Mobile bands are regulated to be exclusive, but nothing about LTE or 5G requires exclusive access or the absence of interference. These devices step on each others toes all the time and (via the magic of OFDMA and other dark trickery) still receive their data just fine.

You could start up a transmitter right in the middle of Verizon's or TMO's exclusive band (ICE is doing so all the time at protest sites across the country!) and the phones wouldn't bat a proverbial eyelash.

To add to this, we know what objects interfere with our satellite contacts. We keep their orbital positions (as best as possible) in mind when scheduling satellite operations to avoid communication failures (partial or total) caused by their interference.

This is often learned after the fact. A contact will fail or go badly and then you can examine what was around it at the time. Over a series of failures the offending satellite will be identified.

Ah sorry, I misread you. I meant “presumably Starshield”, I think autocorrect replaced it with Starlink.