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I'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
by realusername 3y ago
I'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.