this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Starlink works differently than conventional sattelite. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to try to explain it beyond saying that I think it's due to the properties of the sattelites being low orbit, requiring more ground transmission stations and more sattelites than conventional sattelite internet.
I believe their coverage has increased greatly over the past few years. When it was first out my parents also didn't have coverage. They do now, and have for a couple of years.
The satellites are extremely close to Earth in order to reduce latency. Traditional communication satellites sit in geostationary orbit hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the surface, this you being that that's many times the diameter of the Earth so signal delay is pretty noticeable. Starlink satellite wiz around the Earth dozens of times a day, but the advantage is that they're only 200 km up.
The disadvantage of all of this is that each individual satellite has a very small footprint, so it's entirely possible for some regions not to have coverage yet as the network is not complete.