Someone else with more experience could chime in but I would put it at less practical due to latency (sats are very high up), bandwidth (one laser vs a bundle of 1000s of fiber optic cables), cost (to overcome latency you need a closer orbit which requires more sats), single point of failure, lifespan, intercepted communications, solar flares… and that’s just off the top of my head.
I don't actually think latency would be that much worse.
Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour
If you figure out how to make cheap vacuum cables you will probably become very rich.
But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)
You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency.
starlink sats are some of the lowest orbiting satellites in space - 330-370km for v3. this helps latency as well as easy deorbit at end of life. the v3 sats have multiple 400 gbps lasers for meshing... I can't decide if your comment is sarcasm or not actually because starlink is fully functional and doesn't have any of those issues
This data is used in aggregate to decypher household penetration and refine known data about demographics and household income.
Here's an example of the sorta-end-game:
Currently they can know how many kind of "devices" are in your household and using probabilistic statistics give a decent n value of how many "devices" are in a certain zip code. Using that, your advertising can become more efficient by only buying ads in zip codes that contain certain "devices".
I say Zip code because that's what I've worked on in the past at the most granular level for Marketing Mix Modeling or MMM. You can easily venn diagram your first party data with 3rd party brokers, and you can cleanroom the whole thing to get a decent venn-diagram of the overlap.
I’ll keep repeating this but I used to be a technical project manager for “advance analytics” for a major media agency and we used this data in our reporting for ad reach effectiveness.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
A 55" Walmart store brand TV is $200. That's the regular price.
And yes, it's for the reasons those of us who have been in the tech field for a while would guess: it's "smart". It comes preloaded with apps for several streaming services, from which it surely gets a cut. It probably displays ads if allowed to connect to the internet. No doubt it reports what you watch.
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