3 ms·

It’s not ready yet. They don’t have enough satellites in operation yet and as a result it goes offline for short spells throughout the day. They are also esti

by jcims 6y ago

It’s not ready yet. They don’t have enough satellites in operation yet and as a result it goes offline for short spells throughout the day. They are also estimated to be losing about $1900 per dish sold. I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. Lastly, there’s going to be regulatory hurdles in every country they release in.

mschuster91 6y ago
> I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. For what it's worth scale matters a lot in pricing - the more you order of chips, the cheaper they get. I've seen 30x differences in per-unit price for 10 to 10k pieces for chips. For PCBs and injection molding of plastic cases, the situation is similar - especially for plastic cases, where the actual material worth of the plastic is negligible, but the setup costs for (sometimes multiple) rounds of milling molds until the quality of the parts is sufficient are enormous, to the range of 80-100k per mold.
tuatoru 6y ago
There's a youtube of a teardown of a Starlink dish.[1] A nicely patterned printed circuit board, two servomotors, plastic housing parts and an aluminium foil back shield. There's not even an ethernet jack on the PCB, just a JST connector for the ethernet cable. First time I've seen that level of cost cutting. Those'd have to be some seriously expensive ICs on that PCB for the bill of materials to come to $1000, let alone $2400. And ICs are like software, printed circuit boards, aluminium foil stampings, and plastic mouldings. The expensive bit is the upfront design. The more you make, the cheaper the unit cost. EDIT: I see mschuster made the same point. --- Totally agree about the regulatory hurdles. Those could be insurmountable, especially (sadly) in countries where people would really benefit from having access to better internet. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo
- jcims 6y ago
  There's been quite a bit of chatter about a $2.4B contract with STM for 1 million terminals. Maybe that includes dev costs, I don't know.

by jcims 6y ago

mschuster91 6y ago

> I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. For what it's worth scale matters a lot in pricing - the more you order of chips, the cheaper they get. I've seen 30x differences in per-unit price for 10 to 10k pieces for chips. For PCBs and injection molding of plastic cases, the situation is similar - especially for plastic cases, where the actual material worth of the plastic is negligible, but the setup costs for (sometimes multiple) rounds of milling molds until the quality of the parts is sufficient are enormous, to the range of 80-100k per mold.

tuatoru 6y ago

There's a youtube of a teardown of a Starlink dish.[1] A nicely patterned printed circuit board, two servomotors, plastic housing parts and an aluminium foil back shield. There's not even an ethernet jack on the PCB, just a JST connector for the ethernet cable. First time I've seen that level of cost cutting. Those'd have to be some seriously expensive ICs on that PCB for the bill of materials to come to $1000, let alone $2400. And ICs are like software, printed circuit boards, aluminium foil stampings, and plastic mouldings. The expensive bit is the upfront design. The more you make, the cheaper the unit cost. EDIT: I see mschuster made the same point. --- Totally agree about the regulatory hurdles. Those could be insurmountable, especially (sadly) in countries where people would really benefit from having access to better internet. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo

jcims 6y ago
There's been quite a bit of chatter about a $2.4B contract with STM for 1 million terminals. Maybe that includes dev costs, I don't know.