They'll try. But they are between two forces squeezing the TAM:

The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.

The hammer: electronics get cheaper faster when they don't have to be space grade, and electronics get cheaper faster than rockets. As they get cheaper, terrestrial wireless will be deployed in more areas that are uneconomical right now.

And that is how the satellite TAM gets slammed.

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hrimfaxi 2 days ago | parent [-]

> The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.

That's if everyone is trying to connect to the satellite. Would it be possible to have regional hubs that connect and distribute the connection via a local wireless link like 5G?

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Zigurd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You don't need to be close to having everyone connect to cause congestion on a satellite network. That congestion is caused by the amount of data used, not by the number of connections.

Every kind of network has the potential for congestion, it's just easier and much cheaper to engineer a terrestrial network to avoid congestion. There are congestion scenarios for satellite networks that are not solvable.

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toast0 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can use satellite backhaul for a 5G tower. And I'm sure there are many towers with satellite backhaul.

But, once you start having multiple towers near by, you are going to link those up terrestrially (wireless or not) and pretty soon you'll end up with terrestrial backhaul.

	▲	Zigurd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Satellite backhaul really only happens in mobile disaster recovery truck-mounted cell sites, and the fairly rare occasions where a rural site can't use terrestrial wireless backhaul.