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Comment by pnw

6 months ago

5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.

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pnw

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panick21_  6 months ago

Great, but the overwhelming majority of money is made from the place people actually live. Those places are called cities. Only about a few % of earth are built on, and even among those the top 1% is where most people live.

Don't get me wrong, that fucking great business, but its not 'replacing terrestrial ISP' level great.

  • pnw  6 months ago

    They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines back in the day. Based on Starlink's revenue doubling year on year, and a six fold increase since 2022, I don't think anyone really knows what the upper bounds for global access is yet. And traditional telcos are usually limited to a region whereas Starlink is global. Just the top 20 global telcos alone are almost $2 trillion in market cap and $1.35 trillion in revenue. Starlink has captured less than 1% of that revenue to date.