3 ms·

Even though Musk was saying that it's not really meant for cities and wouldn't be a serious competitor there? "the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a m

Even though Musk was saying that it's not really meant for cities and wouldn't be a serious competitor there? "the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-to-telcos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

justapassenger 5y ago
> Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015, with bandwidth to carry up to 50% of all backhaul communications traffic, and up to 10% of local Internet traffic, in high-density cities. CEO Elon Musk said that there is significant unmet demand for low-cost global broadband capabilities. Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink It's typical Musk - announcing something that sounds super cool and impossible, because it's impossible. Ad later quietly scale it down to something still pretty cool, but nothing like it was presented initially. And ride the hype as much as you can in the process.
- mdasen 5y ago
  Elon Musk often makes contradictory statements. He's more recently said that Starlink has received 500,000 pre-orders and that, "Most likely, all of the initial 500k will receive service. More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range." Some of this might be coming from real-world experience with the network and an update on previous incorrect assumptions. Part of it might be simply making bombastic claims. Right now, Starlink hit around 100,000 customers with 1,700 satellites. With the full 12,000 satellites we'd then expect 700,000 customers. That might change given that the satellites aren't geostationary and they haven't launched in many countries, but to hit a million customers in the US, they'd need to increase the number of customers per satellite significantly. Maybe there are improvements they can make that we don't know about, but it seems like Starlink's advantages are in making cheap rockets and cheap satellites - which is very cool, but they likely don't have radio advantages. Starlink is also thinking about an additional 20,000 satellites so it's possible that they'll just keep increasing the number of satellites. Still, if they're seeing linear gains, that's still a relatively small number of users even with 32,000 satellites (and even the 12,000 is 4-5 years away). https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-musk-makes-it-clear-starlink-wont-have-capacity-to-disrupt-us-broadband.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-...

justapassenger 5y ago

> Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015, with bandwidth to carry up to 50% of all backhaul communications traffic, and up to 10% of local Internet traffic, in high-density cities. CEO Elon Musk said that there is significant unmet demand for low-cost global broadband capabilities. Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink It's typical Musk - announcing something that sounds super cool and impossible, because it's impossible. Ad later quietly scale it down to something still pretty cool, but nothing like it was presented initially. And ride the hype as much as you can in the process.

mdasen 5y ago
Elon Musk often makes contradictory statements. He's more recently said that Starlink has received 500,000 pre-orders and that, "Most likely, all of the initial 500k will receive service. More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range." Some of this might be coming from real-world experience with the network and an update on previous incorrect assumptions. Part of it might be simply making bombastic claims. Right now, Starlink hit around 100,000 customers with 1,700 satellites. With the full 12,000 satellites we'd then expect 700,000 customers. That might change given that the satellites aren't geostationary and they haven't launched in many countries, but to hit a million customers in the US, they'd need to increase the number of customers per satellite significantly. Maybe there are improvements they can make that we don't know about, but it seems like Starlink's advantages are in making cheap rockets and cheap satellites - which is very cool, but they likely don't have radio advantages. Starlink is also thinking about an additional 20,000 satellites so it's possible that they'll just keep increasing the number of satellites. Still, if they're seeing linear gains, that's still a relatively small number of users even with 32,000 satellites (and even the 12,000 is 4-5 years away). https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-musk-makes-it-clear-starlink-wont-have-capacity-to-disrupt-us-broadband.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-...