I usually buy an e-sim when I’m traveling and you can get usually get 10-20$/mo unlimited data at reasonable speeds everywhere in Asia except China which is an entire different world of its own and really not worth the hassle so you take what you can get.
One exception is Thailand where I buy 1 year prepaid sim for 40$ unlimited 100mbps which you can keep extending year after year for almost the same price.
All of these prices are irrelevant without considering local salaries but cellular data is really good in Asia. I’ve seen cell towers deep in Vietnams jungles and was actually texting from a cave there. This is why low orbit networks like starlink are severely overrated and will always lose to cell towers.
terrestrial towers are great where there are more people than there would need to be towers and where towers are allowed to be built, getting towers installed in national parks is hard and building them in the middle of nowhere has almost no return on investment, satelite networks could fill this niche where the only current option is wildly expensive satilite phones by Garmin and the likes.
Nah towers are incredibly cheap and can be easily maintained for decades if not centuries. Quick googling around seems like 1 modern towers costs 100k (in the west) usd compared that to entire satellite and launch overhead which seems to be at least 3.5M tho in reality much more. Thats 35 towers for 1 satellite not even considering maintenance and longevity.
Towers are also straight up superior tech that will forver be better than satellites due to simple distance physics.
Rough quick napkin math: earth’s land area is 140m km² and 3g tower can cover 300km² as best - to cover THE ENTIRE EARTH we’d only need 500k towers. That’s like nothing.
That’s 50 Billion usd without the infrastructure and cable overhead ofc but the towers and obviously we’d want play it safer on range so 10x that and it’s still only half a trillion.
Low orbit satellites are inferior tech that is only good for extreme situations like ocean coverage.
I usually buy an e-sim when I’m traveling and you can get usually get 10-20$/mo unlimited data at reasonable speeds everywhere in Asia except China which is an entire different world of its own and really not worth the hassle so you take what you can get.
One exception is Thailand where I buy 1 year prepaid sim for 40$ unlimited 100mbps which you can keep extending year after year for almost the same price.
All of these prices are irrelevant without considering local salaries but cellular data is really good in Asia. I’ve seen cell towers deep in Vietnams jungles and was actually texting from a cave there. This is why low orbit networks like starlink are severely overrated and will always lose to cell towers.
terrestrial towers are great where there are more people than there would need to be towers and where towers are allowed to be built, getting towers installed in national parks is hard and building them in the middle of nowhere has almost no return on investment, satelite networks could fill this niche where the only current option is wildly expensive satilite phones by Garmin and the likes.
Nah towers are incredibly cheap and can be easily maintained for decades if not centuries. Quick googling around seems like 1 modern towers costs 100k (in the west) usd compared that to entire satellite and launch overhead which seems to be at least 3.5M tho in reality much more. Thats 35 towers for 1 satellite not even considering maintenance and longevity.
Towers are also straight up superior tech that will forver be better than satellites due to simple distance physics.
Rough quick napkin math: earth’s land area is 140m km² and 3g tower can cover 300km² as best - to cover THE ENTIRE EARTH we’d only need 500k towers. That’s like nothing.
That’s 50 Billion usd without the infrastructure and cable overhead ofc but the towers and obviously we’d want play it safer on range so 10x that and it’s still only half a trillion.
Low orbit satellites are inferior tech that is only good for extreme situations like ocean coverage.