Starlink vs 5G
Fulfilling the world’s insatiable appetite for bandwidth!
If you don’t know anything about both of the technologies let me give you a brief overview. First up is the Familiar one, that is 5G. Now we all are used to 4G and we have seen how much of an upgrade it was over 3G (many of you have forgotten about the 3G era). Similar will be the expectations from 5G, right? But the thing about 5G is that not only it fulfils the expectation it exceeds them way beyond your imagination.
In theory, 5G is likely to reach speeds that are 20 times faster than 4G LTE. So if your 4G LTE is giving you a download speed of 10 Mbps, 5G will give you a speed of 200 Mbps (it means your 1GB+ movies will be downloaded in seconds). But still, you want to know what is the real-time fastest speed that a 5G device has achieved? and the answer to that is 8.5 Gbps, yes it is in Gbps!. It is achieved by Samsung in their laboratory experiment and it is the fastest in the world. Get ready for an online 3D movie streaming right in your drawing-room.
Apart from the entertainment, it will be used in a wide variety of IT applications, autonomous cars etc but there is, as usual, some drawback with this technology and in the case of 5G it is a major one. The problem is of range if we look at a Samsung 5G tower it has a range of about 500m (1/2km) it means that in every block there will be an entire grid of 5G towers. That will increase the cost for the companies for the development and maintenance of these many towers and that cost will trickle down to the customers.
Now we will look at Elon Musk’s new venture, Starlink, a cool name and an even cooler technology. the idea is to cover the entire earth with a constellation of satellites which will provide internet access to practically every person on the planet. They are planning to launch an army of 42,000
satellites to create an entire grid in the lower earth orbit. It is an ambitious project that is also made with an idea to get some funding for BFR (mars missions). And the internet speed they are claiming is around 1Gbps, not bad as it is still 10 times faster than 4G LTE (100 Mbps) but very less as compared to 5G. It is a definite upgrade than anything we are currently using.
Now it is a time of war, which is better and why? or there is no comparison between them at all.
The first thing is speed, in this department 5G is a clear winner. The second is connectivity in this segment the answer is no one, as 5G is great in high-density areas like cities but it is not good for rural areas because of tower range as there is lesser number of people segregated in a larger landscape. In this situation creating an entire grid of 5G towers is not feasible economically. For rural areas, Starlink has edge simply because it is space internet, you need a dish on your roof or close to your window and you are good to go.
And this is the actual vision of Starlink, they want to serve the 3 to 4% of the hardest to reach customers. This is their market positioning because if we look around the world there are places even in the developed countries where there are no internet connections or if they have access there are connectivity issues, Starlink’s founder Elon Musk says “Starlink is not some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear: it is not, on the contrary, it could be helpful to telcos by serving populations not well covered by cell towers, copper or fiber”
But I don't think that toning down the threat level is accurate because if we see many companies in the telecom sector have already jumped the bandwagon, for example, Vodafone and Samsung are planning to launch their own satellite system which will provide internet access to the masses. Amazon is also coming up with a similar business model and sending satellite will be easy for them as compared to others as the Blue origin is a Rocket company owned by Amazon.
Starlink and 5G both are promising technologies with their merits and demerits. Technology and network innovation always bring incredible advancements to society, whatever may be the future, it will be a big step forward for mankind.
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