Capacity: Why D2D Is Coverage, Not a Network Replacement
How much traffic can a direct-to-device satellite handle, how many users can it serve at once, and what happens when many people use it?
Chapter summary
Not much, by the standards of terrestrial networks.
Key takeaways
- 1
A D2D satellite serves an area of hundreds to thousands of square kilometres per beam with a few megahertz of spectrum, so each beam carries a few to a few tens of megabits per second shared among everyone underneath it.
- 2
First-generation Starlink direct-to-cell beams have been reported at roughly 4–10 Mbps shared; next-generation systems promise far more, with SpaceX citing up to 150 Mbps per user for its 15,000-satellite system and AST citing up to 120 Mbps peak.
- 3
Even those figures are small compared with a single terrestrial cell.
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How a Phone Talks to a Satellite: Doppler, Delay and Handover
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