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Starlink won't get paid until they meet the performance goals, but IIRC they have until 2028 to actually fully meet them. They do have to have a plan of how tha
by Tuna-Fish 4y ago
Starlink won't get paid until they meet the performance goals, but IIRC they have until 2028 to actually fully meet them. They do have to have a plan of how that would happen, and FCC must accept that plan.
It's public knowledge that they intend to launch a lot more satellites before that, so they are probably counting on that to help them.
- phkahler 4y ago>> It's public knowledge that they intend to launch a lot more satellites before that, so they are probably counting on that to help them. Yeah, but they also want to substantially increase the number of subscribers. It seems a shame to add capacity and not users just to get a cheque from the government for hitting some arbitrary numbers. IIRC they could have bid for a lower speed target that they would probably be hitting today.
- wumpus 4y agoThe speed categories were set by the FCC, and SpaceX would have gotten nothing if they weren't in the "fast" category.
- Tuna-Fish 4y ago> It seems a shame to add capacity and not users ... I think they will be doing both. They currently have ~2500 sats in the ~53° constellation. The V2 system that has been approved and is targeting similar latitudes has 3 times the sats, and each sat is claimed to support 9 times the bandwidth of the current ones. So if they need to triple bandwidth per user, they can still increase subscriber count 9-fold and meet it.