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Honest question: rapid expansion to where exactly? Are you thinking poorer, rural countries? E.g., with cheaper terminals Starlink will more aggressively sell t
by bklyn11201 3y ago
Honest question: rapid expansion to where exactly? Are you thinking poorer, rural countries? E.g., with cheaper terminals Starlink will more aggressively sell to rural Brazil, Mexico, India, etc? If they can sell the terminal at cost, how low can they price the monthly service for these poorer countries to fill up unused capacity?
- Robotbeat 3y agoThey’re rapidly launching more and more capacity. The new v2 mini satellites are more than twice as big as the v1.5 satellites, which themselves are not yet totally in service. And as they improve the cost of terminals, there’s no fundamental limit in the amount of capacity for a given frequency allocation. Geometric multiplexing is only limited by the number and cost of the phased array elements. So rapid expansion everywhere. And then launching the full sized v2 Starlink satellites on Starship will account for another ~2-2.5x increase in size compared to the v2 minis. Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled. So they have about a factor of 100 capacity expansion in the pipeline, and they can increase the satellite size even further due to Starship’s low costs. They can expand a lot, even in existing countries. Lots of people are on waiting lists due to capacity being filled up in many regions.
- SEJeff 3y ago> Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled. SpaceX has launched just under 5,100 Starlink satellites to orbit, of which a single digit percentage have either been deorbited for testing, failure, solar storm knocking them out, etc. Their current constellation total size is approved to be around 12,000 satellites. They've been working to get additional approvals up to 42,000 satellites.
- wbl 3y agoPhased arrays aren't magic. The sharpness of the aperture depends on the physical extent of the antenna and very sharp mainlobes come with additional sidelobes.
- Robotbeat 3y agoOf course.
- xeromal 3y agoLarge swaths of the US have bunk internet like Earthlink. My rural family in Appalachia already like Musk. I think they'd love to have Starlink if it was a little more affordable.
- qup 3y agoEarthlink still exists? Wow. When I was a kid, we would steal "ELN" accounts for dial-up and then hop on to AOL via TCP/IP. Edit: we did that so when we got punted we didn't have to go throigh the whole dial-up sequence. Which happened a lot in those days if you were twelve years old.
- Loughla 3y agoWe live in a very rural area. The one time the federal government really came through for me was fiber development grants a few years ago. We went from Wild Blue internet, which was garbage all around, for $120/mo to a full gig fiber connection locked in at $80/mo for life. It cost us $200 to hook it up. More and more rural isp's are getting into fiber with grants.
- HWR_14 3y agoAnd SpaceX was going to get some of that grant money as well. But they messed it up somehow.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoThey very well may still get it
- politician 3y agoI'd buy service to put it on my rooftop to both put economic pressure on the local ISP duopoly in the form of an unambiguous publicly visible third alternative and, also, as a backup.
- jtriangle 3y agoI know of a couple places that are using starlink as failover because they're only serviced by a single ISP. Makes sense really, and cheaper than 4/5g failover.
- SEJeff 3y agoThis is part of why I bought a Starlink dish and put it on the roof of the house I'm doing a full rehab on before the siding was installed. It will give me dual homed internet for when the crap local ISP has issues and a hedge against a single ISP with spotty service. Ironically, in doing this, I have managed to meet and convince a project manager of a new ISP to add our neighborhood to the list to places to pull fiber to, but it will likely be about a year out.
- Out_of_Characte 3y agoSattelite communication is generally more expensive than cable or cell towers. Though about 70% of the earth is unsuitable for these solutions. Alot of commercial boats are still on very low bandwith connections but could potentially benefit from higher bandwidth if only to make video calls or netflix more available for a similar or higher price. Then there are alot of smaller, private, boats that would benefit from sattelite communication if costs werent prohibitive.
- panick21_ 3y agoIf think the competitiveness of sats changes quite a bit once you have really mass produced sats and the Starship. It will like not beat earth bound stuff in many scenarios, but it will be closer then it was in the past.
- MangoCoffee 3y agoApple is offering satellite phone service. Starlink shown it's important in the Ukraine-Russia war. There is Starshield for the government uses. Whatever shortcoming of current telecommunication, Starlink can supplement it.
- sp332 3y agoApple is offering emergency satellite text service.
- rightbyte 3y agoIn only one direction too right? I e. you don't know if the message has been received?
- V99 3y agoYou do, you can try it with updating your find my location without an actual emergency. It tells you where to point/hold and when it's done. The emergency texting is also 2-way.
- jaywalk 3y agoNo, it's bidirectional.
- gregsadetsky 3y agoIt's two-way: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426 "Once you’re connected, your iPhone starts a text conversation with emergency responders by sharing critical information [...] You might be asked to respond to additional messages. Only Latin characters (such as English or French) are supported in these messages. [...]"
- rightbyte 3y agoOk, nice, then my colleague got it wrong.
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- fallingknife 3y agoIf they get 10 million subscribers at $120 per month, that's $14.4 billion per year which is way more than the cost of the network. And they can easily get 10 million in just the US and Canada. So they can price new subscribers in poorer countries at whatever price they need because the marginal cost to add to the network is near zero.
- nico 3y agoI live in the LA-metro area, 15min away from downtown LA This is a pretty dense urban area, and we can only get Spectrum, which goes down at least once a month for hours at a time, in the middle of the day The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks Had a similar issue when living in SF Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small cities, only have one (crappy) vendor I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there’s definitely a market for them in well established, densely populated areas in rich countries
- dotnet00 3y agoThe reason they specified sparsely populated areas is that Starlink is designed for sparsely populated areas. In a denser area the performance would drop drastically because you'd need far higher satellite density to sufficiently distribute the load.
- labcomputer 3y agoThat may be true with current space vehicles, but there’s no fundamental reason that two or more SVs can’t form a distributed phased array (for MIMO a la WiFi). At least from a physics / spectrum perspective. The engineering might be tricky. With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
- dotnet00 3y agoHadn't heard of that concept before, sounds pretty interesting! Will have to read up on it more.
- rini17 3y agoThe distributed array will however share one link and satellites don't have unlimited capacity either. Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
- panick21_ 3y agoI'm always kind of puzzled by this question. There are like 7-8 billion humans. Millions of ships, planes, farm machines and other equipment. Expansion will happen in all direction at the same time, in all market. In very poor country a single village might share one antenna. All the way to very expensive antennas for military aircraft.
- dotnet00 3y agoThere's an additional consideration regarding the price, that poor places can probably share one terminal among one or more villages, thus distributing the cost. Another possibility is distributing costs by using Starlink as backhaul. India for example already has very cheap high speed mobile data, so a telecom company could spread out the costs of terminals and service (maybe even get a better deal for bulk usage) while simplifying and strengthening their own infrastructure for remote or disaster-prone areas. Plus, for SpaceX, any point where a satellite is inactive is money left on the table, so they should have significant price flexibility for places which can't afford the current service fees but can afford something that is more than the cost of bandwidth at the downlink station.
- starbase 3y agoFriend in a developing country has Starlink, he says the dish is about $100 cheaper there and service is just under $50 per month.
- lkbm 3y agoPoorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet as 2021. Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can afford to advertise way more than before. If they can pick up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever that's worth).
- ghaff 3y agoMy dad's (now brother's) house a few minutes outside a decently-sized town by Downeast Maine standards had a barely 1Mbps down "broadband" link and it was the last house on the road that could even get that. With Starlink, it's actually viable to work from there in addition to streaming video etc. Of course, he wouldn't pay literally any amount but he'd probably pay a lot; I would.
- lkbm 3y agoYeah, I suspect they could have gotten my brother to pay the old full cost plus extra. Still, many people in rural areas aren't willing/able to drop $1k on Internet setup, so keeping costs down is worth more than gouging a few remote software engineers.
- ghaff 3y agoCertainly. I'm sure there's a correlation between poor wired broadband and lower income even if it's not perfect. But Starlink is a game changer for a lot of people who otherwise can't get decent wired Internet--and, especially if you can't get wired broadband, the options are mostly pretty bad. Probably changing some with 5G but still not ideal for many people.
- jhallenworld 3y agoThis is an idiotic USA problem. For example, China claims: http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html
- realusername 3y agoI'm also not sure the financial aspect is going to work. There's not many developed countries without proper fiber rollout and very poor countries likely can't support the high infrastructure cost. You're left after that with marginal use cases (boat, remote places...) which won't be enough either. There's a reason why the comments are mentioning rural US, because it's a clear outlier among the developped world.
- snovv_crash 3y agoThe developing world is typically unequal, not universally poor. There are a lot of people in Africa and South America who would get drastically improved internet with Starlink, and can actually afford it.
- realusername 3y agoI'm sure you can find such places, is there enough of them to fund the service which is very expensive? That I'm not so sure. When people are richer, they also tend to live in countries where the internet access is very important to the state and where installing good internet is an important public policy. Of course you have exceptions to that general case but I'm not convinced those exceptions are enough by themselves. They are in a very different market than a traditional product, they are basically servicing the people that nobody else want to service and the distribution of revenue in that group is going to be drastically different from the norm.
- snovv_crash 3y agoThe sattelites give coverage everywhere except polar regions at no extra cost. Africa has 1.4 billion people. South America another 400 million. Even if only the top 2% are your target market that's still roughly the same as the entire rural US.
- slashdev 3y agoFor my parents it’s replaced their cable internet which was slower and less reliable. I wish I could get it where I live in a city apartment. The internet is usually fast, but not reliable. The only way to have satellite in an tall apartment building is to put it on the roof, which is complicated.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoNear term naval and aircraft. Regarding rural third world: the thing about a satellite is it is basically going around in a circle. If the business plan was built around being profitable over the first world then everywhere not over the first world is basically free because you have to build whatever bandwidth you want to provide the first world around the entire orbital ring.
- rdsubhas 3y agoStarlink is not yet ubiquitous even in western countries (EU, UK, US, Can, ...). I believe the rapid expansion meant becoming more ubiquitous in western countries and commercial operations (shipnav, etc). They have a long, long way to go before even talking about developing countries which already are densely populated and mostly have fast, cheap internet already.