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> Starlink would need a few million subscribers paying about $99 a month each to recoup a $5 billion investment in a year’s time That doesn't seem like a lot,

> Starlink would need a few million subscribers paying about $99 a month each to recoup a $5 billion investment in a year’s time That doesn't seem like a lot, considering it is a global ISP. Also, good that Elon's net worth is still pretty high (looks like 165B now) so he can possibly fund it himself for the most part

deleted 5y ago
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dragontamer 5y ago
It seems like a lot, when each Satellite seems to only support 20Gbps or 40Gbps. So to support 100Mbit customers, you need to launch a Satellite once for every 40 customers. Each customer needs a $1000 to $3000 dish to connect to the Satellite (currently $500, so you need almost a year of $99 subscription before you make back the money from the dish alone, and then another few years to recoup the costs of the Satellite launches). This at a time when 5G is beginning to be deployed in mass quantities... and Gbps fiber is available in cities. So cityfolk won't really use Starlink, and 5G will cover many rural areas. Finally: ~~directional WiFi~~ (Woops: got my terms mixedup. Apparently its "Fixed Wireless") works surprisingly well out in rural areas for 50-mile ranges. So if you can get a line-of-sight radio out there, a small town ISP can still deploy over a relatively rural area. EDIT: Directional Wifi is like 1 mile. I got my technologies confused. Only the most rural of areas (over 50-miles away from the nearest potential directional WiFi spots, with no access to 5G or Fiber Optics) would use Starlink, which is... not where people live by definition. Can Musk find millions of rural folk and build an internet service with them?
- wmf 5y ago
  The math is more complicated than that. Oversubscription reduces the number of satellites needed while oceans increase it.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    While that's true, my Physics teacher always said that a crappy calculation that's within-an-order of magnitude is always better than gut-feeling. If we're talking about feasibility and/or if something is a good idea, then once all the math is added up, then we need to see that the final costs are "really really good". EDIT: As long as we're clear on each other's math / assumptions, we can make "napkin level" estimates to guess at the feasibility of this project.
- loeg 5y ago
  I think you're assuming the satellites aren't oversubscribed? Generally consumer ISPs are marketed well in excess of what all customers could actually use simultaneously. The economics change somewhat if you can put 400-4000 customers on the average satellite instead of 40.
- thebean11 5y ago
  You're assuming customers will be using all of their bandwidth 24/7, no ISP / telephone / utility company works like that.
  - lanna 5y ago
    And even then, his calculation is off by a factor of 5 or 10
- SonicScrub 5y ago
  > Only the most rural of areas would use Starlink. I mean yes? Rural and underserved areas always been the target market of Starlink in the first place. Starlink isn't attempting to target the urban market.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > I mean yes? Rural and underserved areas always been the target market of Starlink in the first place. Starlink isn't attempting to target the urban market. Are there millions of people in rural areas who will trust a US-based space ISP over local ISPs? The thing about targeting rural areas, is that you're by definition targeting a small subset of people. People generally live in cities, on the average.
    - lazide 5y ago
      There are millions of people in current rural US with terrible terrible ISP options that would happily pay this. And that isn’t counting other countries. Australia alone is terribly underserved right now by all national ISP’s. Even if you put in the TOS that the NSA is going to jerk off to all their stuff, most would probably be super happy to sign up if it meant sub-300ms pings and > 5mbps speeds.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g... Of the 300-million people in the USA, 250-million live in "Urban" areas. https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch12GARM.pdf https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch12GARM.pdf By definition: this is all towns of 50,000 and above. The next big group of people are in 5,000+ person towns, which are a good target for 5G and fixed wireless internet. I've got an uncle who lives in one of these areas ("rural" for sure, but with line-of-sight to the town center so wireless / line of sight still works and so do cell phones / internet) I think you're grossly overestimating the number of people where Starlink's $500 upfront costs + $99 / month is competitive. Furthermore: line-of-sight is not a problem for a lot of people. Huge swaths of the USA's rural areas are extremely flat (ex: Kansas, Iowa, etc. etc.). So Fixed Wireless is reliable for many miles.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Not the most rural, remember that also this is unlimited data while most carriers still shy away from "truly" unlimited data plans. Yes 5g, more bandwidth etc so plans may become more liberal but still. WISP for rural areas are hard to manage, not just the engineering but the marketing and customer retention, now I feel (really believe/know) is not the time to even begin to be a rural WISP where starlink and telecoms are on technological breakthroughs to literally deicentivize using you.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > So to support 100Mbit customers, you need to launch a Satellite once for every 40 customers. No, you don't. Oversubscription is a thing, a rather obvious thing when you go looking for it (evening Netflix time is horrible bandwidth on any ISP lately, including my Starlink connection), and you could comfortably handle hundreds (or low thousands) of customers at once on a single 40Gbit bird. No, not everyone will be able to pull their max speed at the same time, but that's just not a use case you design an ISP for. Assume 20Mbit or so in the evenings for Netflix or Prime or whatever on most of your customers, then let the rest of the bandwidth shuffle around as needed.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Oversubscription proved to be a problematic thing early in 2020, because of everyone working from home. This will ease up, but the old oversubscription numbers won’t work anymore as people have permanently changed some of their habits. And the bandwidth required by any given household will only really go up in the future.
- ynfnehf 5y ago
  Your math is off by an order of magnitude. 40Gbps/100Mbps=400. It should also be able to handle at least 4000 customers (10x) through oversubscrpition.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  There can be a lot of arguments against starlink as envisioned but the reasons you gave don't seem to hold up. > cityfolk won't really use Starlink I don't think starlink was ever meant to replace current high speed internet. > 5G will cover many rural areas 5G means many different things. The high speed bands don't have enough range to make them economical to build in rural areas from what I've read. > directional WiFi (Fixed Wireless) works surprisingly well out in rural areas for 50-mile ranges Yes, if it's directional, and the directionality is pretty narrow if you want to get any reasonable performance. I don't think it's feasible for each town to have a dedicated antenna for each house within a 50 mile radius.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > Yes, if it's directional, and the directionality is pretty narrow if you want to get any reasonable performance. I don't think it's feasible for each town to have a dedicated antenna for each house within a 50 mile radius. You're asking the wrong questions. So lets say Starlink is 4000-customers per satellite (10x oversubscription of a 40Gbps underlying, 100Mbit per customer, seem fair to you?). It costs $1000 to $3000 for the Starlink Satellite dish right now. The total costs of Starlink, per customer, is therefore 1/400th of a satellite launch + $1500 or so (depending on how cheaply the dish can get). Can you run an antenna from a town center to a house 50-miles away for less than $1500 + SatelliteLaunch/4000 ?? EDIT: 4000, not 400. I admit that I don't know how much a Satellite Launch costs, but Elon Musk is asking $30 Billion for a reason. I assume the satellite launches are a good chunk of those costs.
  - wmf 5y ago
    A dedicated point-to-point link costs $300 or less which is even cheaper than Starlink.
- deleted 5y ago
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simonh 5y ago
All that wealth is tied up in his shares in his companies, he doesn’t have much in the way of liquidity to fund anything and I don’t see him selling large chunks of these companies any time soon. Occasional judicious funding rounds, sure, but that’s not really him funding anything.
jollybean 5y ago
Edit: I stand corrected, my math (below) is off by 10, I would delete this comment if I could, otherwise kindly ignore this comment. They need 10 million customers paying that to generate $1B in revenues - that doesn't include all of the other costs involved. Assuming even good margins, they'd need 10's of millions of customers to get to $1B in earnings in a year. And that's with rosy numbers around margins. I don't think it adds up very well and this will only work as long as the 'hyperbubble valuation' period of lofty expecations and very low interest rates continue. If there is a market correction, esp. due to higher interest rates ... then it won't look good. But until then, it could work.
- underwater 5y ago
  That's $99 per month, not per year. 10 million customers would be $12B revenue a year.
- cdash 5y ago
  10 million customers is $12B revenue a year.
me_me_me 5y ago
Its all fun and games until they all want to watch Netflix at 8 pm. Then the individual throughput might go into shit prompting people to cancel cuz they cant even watch Netflix. For 99 a month i dont think I would get it unless there was no other option.

deleted 5y ago

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dragontamer 5y ago

It seems like a lot, when each Satellite seems to only support 20Gbps or 40Gbps. So to support 100Mbit customers, you need to launch a Satellite once for every 40 customers. Each customer needs a $1000 to $3000 dish to connect to the Satellite (currently $500, so you need almost a year of $99 subscription before you make back the money from the dish alone, and then another few years to recoup the costs of the Satellite launches). This at a time when 5G is beginning to be deployed in mass quantities... and Gbps fiber is available in cities. So cityfolk won't really use Starlink, and 5G will cover many rural areas. Finally: ~~directional WiFi~~ (Woops: got my terms mixedup. Apparently its "Fixed Wireless") works surprisingly well out in rural areas for 50-mile ranges. So if you can get a line-of-sight radio out there, a small town ISP can still deploy over a relatively rural area. EDIT: Directional Wifi is like 1 mile. I got my technologies confused. Only the most rural of areas (over 50-miles away from the nearest potential directional WiFi spots, with no access to 5G or Fiber Optics) would use Starlink, which is... not where people live by definition. Can Musk find millions of rural folk and build an internet service with them?

wmf 5y ago
The math is more complicated than that. Oversubscription reduces the number of satellites needed while oceans increase it.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  While that's true, my Physics teacher always said that a crappy calculation that's within-an-order of magnitude is always better than gut-feeling. If we're talking about feasibility and/or if something is a good idea, then once all the math is added up, then we need to see that the final costs are "really really good". EDIT: As long as we're clear on each other's math / assumptions, we can make "napkin level" estimates to guess at the feasibility of this project.
loeg 5y ago
I think you're assuming the satellites aren't oversubscribed? Generally consumer ISPs are marketed well in excess of what all customers could actually use simultaneously. The economics change somewhat if you can put 400-4000 customers on the average satellite instead of 40.
thebean11 5y ago
You're assuming customers will be using all of their bandwidth 24/7, no ISP / telephone / utility company works like that.
- lanna 5y ago
  And even then, his calculation is off by a factor of 5 or 10
SonicScrub 5y ago
> Only the most rural of areas would use Starlink. I mean yes? Rural and underserved areas always been the target market of Starlink in the first place. Starlink isn't attempting to target the urban market.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > I mean yes? Rural and underserved areas always been the target market of Starlink in the first place. Starlink isn't attempting to target the urban market. Are there millions of people in rural areas who will trust a US-based space ISP over local ISPs? The thing about targeting rural areas, is that you're by definition targeting a small subset of people. People generally live in cities, on the average.
  - lazide 5y ago
    There are millions of people in current rural US with terrible terrible ISP options that would happily pay this. And that isn’t counting other countries. Australia alone is terribly underserved right now by all national ISP’s. Even if you put in the TOS that the NSA is going to jerk off to all their stuff, most would probably be super happy to sign up if it meant sub-300ms pings and > 5mbps speeds.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g... Of the 300-million people in the USA, 250-million live in "Urban" areas. https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch12GARM.pdf https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch12GARM.pdf By definition: this is all towns of 50,000 and above. The next big group of people are in 5,000+ person towns, which are a good target for 5G and fixed wireless internet. I've got an uncle who lives in one of these areas ("rural" for sure, but with line-of-sight to the town center so wireless / line of sight still works and so do cell phones / internet) I think you're grossly overestimating the number of people where Starlink's $500 upfront costs + $99 / month is competitive. Furthermore: line-of-sight is not a problem for a lot of people. Huge swaths of the USA's rural areas are extremely flat (ex: Kansas, Iowa, etc. etc.). So Fixed Wireless is reliable for many miles.
rootsudo 5y ago
Not the most rural, remember that also this is unlimited data while most carriers still shy away from "truly" unlimited data plans. Yes 5g, more bandwidth etc so plans may become more liberal but still. WISP for rural areas are hard to manage, not just the engineering but the marketing and customer retention, now I feel (really believe/know) is not the time to even begin to be a rural WISP where starlink and telecoms are on technological breakthroughs to literally deicentivize using you.
Syonyk 5y ago
> So to support 100Mbit customers, you need to launch a Satellite once for every 40 customers. No, you don't. Oversubscription is a thing, a rather obvious thing when you go looking for it (evening Netflix time is horrible bandwidth on any ISP lately, including my Starlink connection), and you could comfortably handle hundreds (or low thousands) of customers at once on a single 40Gbit bird. No, not everyone will be able to pull their max speed at the same time, but that's just not a use case you design an ISP for. Assume 20Mbit or so in the evenings for Netflix or Prime or whatever on most of your customers, then let the rest of the bandwidth shuffle around as needed.
- falcolas 5y ago
  Oversubscription proved to be a problematic thing early in 2020, because of everyone working from home. This will ease up, but the old oversubscription numbers won’t work anymore as people have permanently changed some of their habits. And the bandwidth required by any given household will only really go up in the future.
ynfnehf 5y ago
Your math is off by an order of magnitude. 40Gbps/100Mbps=400. It should also be able to handle at least 4000 customers (10x) through oversubscrpition.
SahAssar 5y ago
There can be a lot of arguments against starlink as envisioned but the reasons you gave don't seem to hold up. > cityfolk won't really use Starlink I don't think starlink was ever meant to replace current high speed internet. > 5G will cover many rural areas 5G means many different things. The high speed bands don't have enough range to make them economical to build in rural areas from what I've read. > directional WiFi (Fixed Wireless) works surprisingly well out in rural areas for 50-mile ranges Yes, if it's directional, and the directionality is pretty narrow if you want to get any reasonable performance. I don't think it's feasible for each town to have a dedicated antenna for each house within a 50 mile radius.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > Yes, if it's directional, and the directionality is pretty narrow if you want to get any reasonable performance. I don't think it's feasible for each town to have a dedicated antenna for each house within a 50 mile radius. You're asking the wrong questions. So lets say Starlink is 4000-customers per satellite (10x oversubscription of a 40Gbps underlying, 100Mbit per customer, seem fair to you?). It costs $1000 to $3000 for the Starlink Satellite dish right now. The total costs of Starlink, per customer, is therefore 1/400th of a satellite launch + $1500 or so (depending on how cheaply the dish can get). Can you run an antenna from a town center to a house 50-miles away for less than $1500 + SatelliteLaunch/4000 ?? EDIT: 4000, not 400. I admit that I don't know how much a Satellite Launch costs, but Elon Musk is asking $30 Billion for a reason. I assume the satellite launches are a good chunk of those costs.
- wmf 5y ago
  A dedicated point-to-point link costs $300 or less which is even cheaper than Starlink.
deleted 5y ago
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simonh 5y ago

All that wealth is tied up in his shares in his companies, he doesn’t have much in the way of liquidity to fund anything and I don’t see him selling large chunks of these companies any time soon. Occasional judicious funding rounds, sure, but that’s not really him funding anything.

jollybean 5y ago

Edit: I stand corrected, my math (below) is off by 10, I would delete this comment if I could, otherwise kindly ignore this comment. They need 10 million customers paying that to generate $1B in revenues - that doesn't include all of the other costs involved. Assuming even good margins, they'd need 10's of millions of customers to get to $1B in earnings in a year. And that's with rosy numbers around margins. I don't think it adds up very well and this will only work as long as the 'hyperbubble valuation' period of lofty expecations and very low interest rates continue. If there is a market correction, esp. due to higher interest rates ... then it won't look good. But until then, it could work.

underwater 5y ago
That's $99 per month, not per year. 10 million customers would be $12B revenue a year.
cdash 5y ago
10 million customers is $12B revenue a year.

me_me_me 5y ago

Its all fun and games until they all want to watch Netflix at 8 pm. Then the individual throughput might go into shit prompting people to cancel cuz they cant even watch Netflix. For 99 a month i dont think I would get it unless there was no other option.