If I am paying for a product and a 90% majority of its features I don't care about and only care about 10% of it working really well I'm going to feel like I'm overpaying since I only use and care about 10% of the product, but pay for 100% of it.
And if I were a paying customer I'd keep getting more and more weary if I see the focus of the product keeps being this 90% I don't care about.
That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa.
The satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water.
Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
Yeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
A ground station doesn't have to actually be on the ground. They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater. This YouTube video (along with others on this channel) does a good job of explaining how this could work. [https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY]
> They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater.
They could, but I bet they won't. Speculation is fun but permanent floating platforms are expensive, it's easier to just wait until inter-satellite links.
without interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.
