4 ms·

I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog. It does however possess two

by Aloha 5y ago

I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog. It does however possess two chief advantages - the appearance of being novel and speed of construction. To build a cellular network to cover the areas that starlink does would take a decade - where it can be done at all. The aforementioned novel appearance also gets it largely free spectrum, which I believe starlink didn't have to go thru auction for. To be clear - it's not novel, it's more or less a cellular network where the cell sites move about instead of the subscriber - which is something iridium did. I'm still not sure it can make money however.

theshrike79 5y ago
> I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog. Starlink is a miracle for people with shitty or no cellular infrastructure. There are places in Australia that have exactly one cell tower for signal and they get 3G speeds at best. And if that tower has a fault, they'll be out of access for days or weeks. $99 per month for Starlink is a no-brainer.
- Aloha 5y ago
  I don't think it can be profitable at that price is the point.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Current satellite broadband (in the US) is in that same pricing ballpark, I don't see why Starlink couldn't be profitable at that price-- or even lower-- once it scales up.
    - Aloha 5y ago
      Different Opex and technical requirements - The opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network (and Starlinks opex is certainly more than a convention geosynchronous satellite system). Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper - this on top of the inherent launch costs, and the much much much larger fleet, implies that there may be a disconnect in pricing.
jve 5y ago
> To be clear - it's not novel Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites. Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me. You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc. This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- wcarey 5y ago
  It's not exactly equivalent, but I think the TDRS provides communication between different objects in space.
- lmm 5y ago
  > Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?
- Aloha 5y ago
  Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths. Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper. The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.

by Aloha 5y ago

theshrike79 5y ago

> I'm not convinced that starlink is cheaper or better for than ground based cellular infrastructure - its closest technical analog. Starlink is a miracle for people with shitty or no cellular infrastructure. There are places in Australia that have exactly one cell tower for signal and they get 3G speeds at best. And if that tower has a fault, they'll be out of access for days or weeks. $99 per month for Starlink is a no-brainer.

Aloha 5y ago
I don't think it can be profitable at that price is the point.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Current satellite broadband (in the US) is in that same pricing ballpark, I don't see why Starlink couldn't be profitable at that price-- or even lower-- once it scales up.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    Different Opex and technical requirements - The opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network (and Starlinks opex is certainly more than a convention geosynchronous satellite system). Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper - this on top of the inherent launch costs, and the much much much larger fleet, implies that there may be a disconnect in pricing.

jve 5y ago

> To be clear - it's not novel Except no-one has run constellation of thousand satellites. Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Except no-one can provide you with low latency, high speed satellite internet. If you have alternatives (I do where I live) - Starlink is probably not for me. You seem to paint as if starlink is something trivial, as some years ago people were thinking CRAZY - they can't possibly put that much satellites up there. Not to mention that people were really surprised they could put 60 satellites on a single rocket. That they established mass production of satellites. Etc. This kind of comment reminds me of the Dropbox introductionary post [1]: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

wcarey 5y ago
It's not exactly equivalent, but I think the TDRS provides communication between different objects in space.
lmm 5y ago
> Except no-one is trying establish sat-to-sat communication links (I may be wrong here, someone should provide proof) Iridium has been running sat-to-sat communication links since 1998?
Aloha 5y ago
Taking what Iridium did and scaling it up 500x does not make it novel. Iridium did all of the things Starlink does - it just did them with 2G bandwidths, instead of 5G bandwidths. Furthermore the opex of keeping a constellation that large in orbit, has not been proven to be cheaper than operating a ground based wireless network. Starlink operates with an assumption, that has not yet been proven to be true - that the cost per kg to launch something into LEO will go down as time goes on. If this prediction does not prove to be true, then it has no hope of making money, much less being self-sustaining. Beyond this, the shorter lifetime of their sat fleet compared to a geosynchronous sat, means they must be replaced sooner, but its not obvious that the sats are significantly cheaper. The appearance of novelness is what allowed SpaceX to get the spectrum to operate what is effectively another cellular network - well a hybrid between fixed wireless and cellular.