SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs. I'm betting the next acquisition target will be AST SpaceMobile. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see big telecom/ISP mergers pass regulatory approval now that they have competition from the heavens
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> SpaceX and Amazon seem to be headed for competing with traditional telecoms and ISPs.
Traditional ISPs already have a nice network of copper and fiber optic cables. I don't think satellites offer any advantage to most people here, except for those living in an area with slow wired connections.
Intercontinental latency in air/vacuum is lower than in fiber (even in total, i.e. after accounting for the extra distance from ground and the legs up and down from/space), so there’s also a market for high frequency trading.
It's all about bypassing regulations, just like Uber and AirBNB. Most US ISPs have old copper cables that only support DSL. Upgrading them means digging up the streets and that's expensive and a legal minefield. And those ISPs are local monopolies so why would they spend money just to keep the same number of customers who are locked in anyway?
I don't think that is very true in this day in age. Here in Cincinnati, the vast majority of houses now have fiber run to them. There are still some stragglers, but that's mainly because slumlord apartment owners don't feel like dealing with upgrades.
