"The satellite constellations can reach everyone everywhere and the new land-based wireless networks are "leveling up". They definitely can serve mass markets in cities with the milimeter wave segment of 5G."
Sorry but physically ONE street cabinet for VDSL, FTTH or Hybrid Fibre Cable can have more capacity than satellite for an entire region. About 10 people for a sector or 30 for a mast doing streaming (in fake HD) will max out a mast.
The 5G is largely hype. The higher faster bands are for stadiums or to replace cheaper WiFi in cafes and open plan offices. It's line of sight.
There are actual lies being peddled by some phone system vendors, some startup satellite outfits and the media.
The physics and mathematics mean that unless every 3rd lampost in a city is a mobile mast, mobile can't ever provide broadband. The contention is controlled by refusing or dropping connections.
There are broadly 3 kinds of satellite systems. They can sound fast, but that's a raw speed SHARED by 100,000 to a million users.
Cable, Fibre, DSL, VDSL are not going to be replaced for real broadband. That's fantasy. The satellite systems are competing with Mobile, typically mobile is better. Mobile is cellular so even 3G can do up to 10 times better in practice just by increasing the cell density. But unless the mobile is charged for on a data used + speed basis there is negative incentive to add more masts.
Throttling is complex. It absolutely has to happen on Mobile because otherwise there would be no voice calls. The Net neutrality debate in the USA is poisoned on both sides by competing corporate interests. The HFC (hybrid fibre cable) and Fibre (to home or cabinet) has so much capacity (about 1,000x of a phone mast and up to 100,000x per user of satellite) that it hardly needs caps or throttles on specific traffic.
Caps and throttles done purely for engineering reasons (not to favour your own product) are due to lack of capacity that on mobile would mean calls dropped or blocked. The 4G has no efficient native voice at all, so actually has poorer capacity for voice calls than 2G or 3G per Mega Hertz, the operator calls use VOIP, so there is no reason to limit VOIP on 4G.
Traditional cable and DSL is more complex and it's true that some operators throttled traffic for competitive reasons rather than engineering. The simple solution is for ISPs (Internet Providers) to be forbidden to sell any other service on their platform.
Also more fibre.
Satellite is for people in the wastelands, jungle, deserts. Not even Africa now as they have mobile and fibre.
Mobile should not be used by people sitting at home or in an office. That means less speed or no connection for people actually MOBILE. All homes and offices should have fibre. Apart from 100 to 1000x faster, it's always on and uses about 20x less electricity for 1000x speed! Decent masts need fibre feeds anyway.
The growth in streaming can only be supported by modern cable (HFC), VDSL or Fibre. Satellite and Mobile can only support a handful of people per mast sector (typically max 3 sectors) or per satellite per town/village as the satellite covers a large area. The very low orbit ones only solve latency, they are poor capacity per user if economically subscribed and each one is only available for maybe 10 minutes, that's why they are needing a big fleet. Being low they have a short operational life compared to the Geostationary satellites (which have horrible latency).
Last edited by Quoth; 05-16-2020 at 05:45 AM.
Reason: Satellites.
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