There’s other stuff happening outside of our little terrestrial RAN world – which RCR has obsessed over for the last week. There is lots of news (and talk) about satellite comms, too. So let’s consider it, as part of a Friday afternoon ramble, and agree at the outset that a big problem – with politics, tech, society, journalism (!) – is how binary everything seems to be; like there is no middle ground (and we know what happens when the middle collapses). So as a journalistic exercise (and an anti-fascist rant) we should correct some of the populist rhetoric peddled by both sides in the Starlink debate – and fold-in some news, along the way.

The debate is reductive. In the red corner, you have noisy ‘influencers’ on LinkedIn talking like Elon Musk is about to replace terrestrial operators with a busy constellation of flying routers. (Really, they should be required to declare their stock investments.) In the blue, you have an army of dyed-in-the-wool radio engineers, plus some displaced software programmers, insisting that physics, spectrum, and basic network economics make the whole scheme laughable. Both positions are too neat. Musk, of course, has been winding the crank arm on his hype machine. “It is increasingly probable that Starlink will carry a majority of Earth’s IP traffic long-term,” he said a couple of days ago.

It was a line repeated from his firm’s IPO brochure (or its last quarterly results?). “Starlink would de-facto become the internet, and everything else would connect to [it],” he said. Which is a big statement, but hardly a proper forecast. But think on it: the answer is not that satellites beat fiber. They don’t; fiber, in the red corner, is good for high volumes of predictable traffic where lots of people live. Satellite, in the blue, puts capacity in the sky – and somewhere on the ground. Starlink is upping the ante, too: its new satellites (V3) are geared for 1Tbps of downlink capacity; its latest launch vehicle (Starship) is intended to deploy as many as 60 at a time.

The first operational batch went up last week, delivering 26 satellites. The rate at which orbital capacity can be manufactured and deployed is skyrocketing. But 26Tbps of satellite capacity is not 26Tbps of useful capacity – over New York at 8pm. Orbital geometry, spectrum availability, beam usage, radio interference – all matter. So do terminals, gateways, and demand. There is a useful counter-point to the Starlink binary from Spanish NB-IoT group Sateliot, which has just put five satellites into orbit on a SpaceX transporter rocket (Falcon 9) – to expand its constellation to 11, about-double its daily ‘passes’, and halve its ‘revisit’ times…

Ahh, but we have run out of room. Click here for the rest of this article, including more about the FCC’s new satellite spectrum, Sateliot’s latest launches, Nokia’s sovereign satellite pitch, the US carriers’ D2D gambit, Europe’s sovereign-space push – and why all of this might be less about replacing terrestrial networks than figuring out who owns the next bit of them.