The limited bandwidth of practical microwaves shared by everyone in the footprint of a satellite, which is thousands of square kilometres. More satellites help, but since it hears the signals from every person on earth in its footprint, even if that person is connecting to a different satellite, there are limited gains when you reach the point where they have a lot of overlap - literally limited by geometry. Compare that with fiber, which allows for virtually unlimited unshared service bandwidth that can get faster as it’s built out and becomes more popular.
Beam steering largely mitigates most of these problems. Fiber is definitely more scalable, but also far more expensive (somehow…) to provide last mile to the entire planet.
You seem to know a lot about these limits, can you elaborate?
I don’t think there are actual physics limitations on network capacity right now
The limited bandwidth of practical microwaves shared by everyone in the footprint of a satellite, which is thousands of square kilometres. More satellites help, but since it hears the signals from every person on earth in its footprint, even if that person is connecting to a different satellite, there are limited gains when you reach the point where they have a lot of overlap - literally limited by geometry. Compare that with fiber, which allows for virtually unlimited unshared service bandwidth that can get faster as it’s built out and becomes more popular.
Beam steering largely mitigates most of these problems. Fiber is definitely more scalable, but also far more expensive (somehow…) to provide last mile to the entire planet.