Compared to what?

Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.

Yep, definitely beyond sky-high prices :)

Well it's n̵o̵t̵ rocket science.

Starlink signals are essentially line of sight right now. The bump up in power to penetrate even a single layer of drywall is almost certainly way outside the power budget of a Starlink satellite.

Whether a material is opaque to it. Buildings are transparent to lower frequency radio. Imagine that the satellites transmitted in visible light, doesnt really matter how powerful it is if you're in a room with no windows.

Starlink is used in low density areas. You could setup LTE towers at a remote mine and use Starlink for the back haul, but for their customers using WiFi calling gives the same benefit without extra hardware.

because providers retain their more penetrating frequencies on the 3G or 4G signal to maintain universal coverage

keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense

Definitely on T Mobile, then

> All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers

The ITU is pretty overt about how frequency allocation governance works. Absolutely no one wants a free-for-all frequency regime, for a multitude of reasons - not even SpaceX.

You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.

1. Pretty much every country on earth with a government regulates how radio spectrum is licensed for telecommunications, not for the purposes of control as an end, but coordination and preventing interference.

An example is flying over India. Satellite internet service is not permitted. It cuts off the moment your flight crossed land in India and usually re-actives immediately after leaving.

Pirate radio is a lot less fun to run if you need it to be two-way.

Because you need your customers on the ground to run their own pirate transmitter (which can be located and penalized by ground authorities), and your satellites need to receive signals from the ground - which ground authorities from first-world countries can make arbitrarily difficult, deciphering a multitude of <1W transmission from customer cellphones is kinda difficult when a modern electronic warfare radar transmitter is tracking your satellite at the same time.

Help me: Is DTC "direct-to-consumer"? I tried to Google for it, but I didn't find anything obvious. Else, hat tip for this FCC find! What a great share on HN.

It's not. They don't have the capacity to cover densely populated areas and it will always be cheaper to build out infrastructure on land in those areas than to launch something into space.

All ground station as a service are limited by radio licensing, you need to apply for transmit license to the country that the groundstation is located to legally transmit to your cubesat. Its not as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance

Some regulation horror: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/space/Pages/API.aspx . Worst case you need to wait 7 years! to get your radio license

Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.

At first I thought you misspelled TDRSS but then I found out that IDRS is a thing: https://www.idrsspace.com/

Its too big and power hungry to fit inside 10x20x30 cm cubesat though :( More reason to go bigger

I think the fact that they haven't may be kind of indicative. Last I searched it had supported maximum local device density of just handful in miles.

That reminds me, I wonder what they did about the Subaru Starlink trademark.

Kinda not. Generally if you got road you got reception. Only wilderness areas don’t. For few people who go camping, etc the standalone miniterminal makes most sense.

They do, but only with very low bandwidth. The initial service is just sms messages, nothing else.

Unless they can remove buildings from this world, that isn't going to be a reality.

A lot has changed, but the calculus of fiber vs. satellites hasn't. Fiber (and fiber-served cellular) is good for high density, satellites are good for low density.