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Shares of Starlink's European rival Eutelsat have tripled
- palata 2y ago> Matching Starlink’s 40,000 would take “a couple of months, not years.” Wow, that's faster than I would have expected. Good thing in this case!
- raverbashing 2y agoI think matching in coverage, not necessarily matching in the same LEO scheme as Starlink
- friseurtermin 2y agoThe article phrases this weirdly, but they are talking about the 40,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine that Eutelsat is trying to match, not about LEO satellites.
- _fizz_buzz_ 2y agoEutelsat's oneweb subsidary currently has something over 500 satellites in LEO orbit. I think starlink has over 7000. I don't know much about all of this, but I assume if it just about covering ukraine they won't have to match the 7000 starlink satellites. The whole situation might open a opportunity for oneweb to catch up with starlink.
- ninalanyon 2y agoThe number refers to the ground terminals not satellites.
- mlindner 2y agoEutelsat already has global coverage. So coverage is also the wrong word to use.
- mlindner 2y agoThe CEO is blatantly lying to you at a level that I would call securities fraud. First off the basic facts are wrong, SpaceX has just over 7000 satellites, not 40,000. Secondly it is physically impossible to launch even 7000 satellites within a few months, even for SpaceX. The satellites do not exist and would need to be built which takes over a year at a minimum. Europe launches rockets into space a couple times a year and you can only launch around a dozen or two satellites per launch. That means just to reach 7000 satellites, assuming 20 per launch and a generous 10 launches per year is over 3.5 years to launch all those satellites. Edit: The problem appears to be with the low quality terminology. It is using the word "satellites" to refer to ground terminals. Ground terminals are not "satellites". It is still incorrect however as Eutelsat doesn't have the bandwidth required to serve what SpaceX is providing to Ukraine. They can provide a backup, but it will be significantly degraded versus what Ukraine already uses.
- argsnd 2y agoThey’re not lying you’re just not reading. They’re talking about terminals on the ground.
- porridgeraisin 2y ago> low quality terminology What? The article never used satellite to refer to ground terminals. They used the word terminals.
- yencabulator 2y agoThe byline does say "to get as many satellites into Ukraine as [...]", which doesn't sound pleasant.
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoThis can only be a good thing. The Europeans tend to do things a bit more slowly but more rigorously.
- eru 2y agoI'm not sure. It might just be related to the US (and by extension American companies) being seen as less reliable in light of recent political developments.
- etiam 2y agoOf course. The US "negotiators" for the so called mineral deal trying fleece Ukraine, a state fighting valiantly for it's freedom and continued existence, out of 400 billion dollars in protection payments, had it as piece of the coercion to threaten cutting Starlink access. In context, that's literally an act of war. Nobody wants to be addicted to this and vulnerable to being coerced and manipulated by threats of having service revoked at catastrophic times unless they do exactly whatever Musk and his puppetmasters say.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoUnpopular opinion: How else should Ukraine pay for the military assistance it's receiving? That's not cheap. The US, NATO and EU taxpayers don't owe Ukraine anything for free since there's no contractual obligation to do so. Money doesn't just rain from the sky, the US and EU taxpayer are ultimately bankrolling this. Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me. Nothing in life is ever free, someone is always paying for it, usually through taxes. If you think this logic is flawed, argument me why.
- Y-bar 2y agoSpeaking as a European now. I give Ukraine money via taxes and occasional donations. Ukraine repays me many times over by their blood, sweat, and tears to keep Europe free and democratic. This is an easy and cheap trade for me, and I could/should probably pay them even more for what they give in return.
- askl 2y agoHow different are these two systems? Might be worth modifying the Starlink terminals so they work with Eutelsat infrastructure instead of becoming scrap.
- verzali 2y agoUnlikely to be easily possible. The chips inside the Starlink terminal will not work with Eutelsat or any other network than Starlink. In theory Eutelsat and Starlink might be able to work together to make them compatible, but it would be difficult and complex. It is easier just to distribute new equipment.
- etiam 2y agoDoes anyone know how the terminals are built? Any chance the Starlink branded ones are actually generic enough to be used with a better firmware?
- actionfromafar 2y agoEven if they somehow are compatible in principle (frequencies etc) it would be like developing a new product, but one where you will never get any new hardware, and without any documentation on said hardware. I.e. a nightmare.
- etiam 2y agoIt makes sense what you say, though for some hellish physical working conditions it might have been worth to pay the engineering nightmare for a while. Do you think it's achievable for basic functionality in time to be meaningful, if it were for a few months that would otherwise have outage / shortage i a lot of places?
- bluescrn 2y agoBut do they have the capabilities to put satellites into orbit cost-effectively without supporting 'evil Elon'?
- INTPenis 2y agoThis may come as a shock but European companies have been putting commercial satelites into orbit since the 70s.
- boxed 2y agoYea, at enormous cost, and very slowly. Europe was also totally without any launch capacity for quite a while since Ariane 6 didn't work out great.
- josefx 2y agoThe Ariane 6 is mainly for larger payloads. Europe was still using Vega and Vega-C for satellites .
- rsynnott 2y ago> Europe was also totally without any launch capacity for quite a while since Ariane 6 didn't work out great. As someone else mentioned, Vega C was operational during this period, but also, define 'quite a while'. Last Ariane 5 launch was in mid 2023, First Ariane 6 launch was in mid 2024. Eutelsat is a commercial company, of course, and doesn't have to use Arianespace/ESA stuff; they have in the past used Ariane 4 and 5, Proton, Falcon 9, and various Atlases and Deltas, and are a fairly obvious candidate customer for Blue Origin.
- boxed 2y agoMy bad. I should have said heavy lift capacity, not all capacity. I screwed that up.
- Yeul 2y agoIndependence has a price. Something European countries are very aware of.
- mlindner 2y agoThe title is intellectually dishonest. Eutelsat is not in any way a rival to Starlink. They are not at all playing in the same league. Starlink has over 7000 satellites. Eutelsat has several hundred they got from their purchase of OneWeb and isn't increasing them by much. The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
- patall 2y ago> The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink. I cannot follow. Where did this happen? Isn't it the US that is not offering Starlink anymore? And did Eutelsat increase prices or did their competition change TOS? This is a form of victim blaming.
- mlindner 2y agoThe US has not stopped providing Starlink in any way. This is entirely based around fear that the US government may suddenly stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink connectivity. Also Eutelsat is not a victim. My point is that they're capitalizing on Europe's fears. (And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.) There hasn't been any threats to stop providing Ukraine with Starlink either. (There was a single news media source claiming this, but it was denied by SpaceX, Musk, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials.)
- piva00 2y ago> (And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.) Hmm... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64579267 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64579267
- 2y ago
- verzali 2y agoEuropean stocks are overall outperforming US ones this year. They're up about 10% since January, US ones have fallen by about 2%.
- stogot 2y agoCan we use cross-border stocks to indicate a baseline? There’s hundreds of variables. Though US uncertainty right now is a leading cause of share price suppression
- consumer451 2y agoThis is certainly an interesting pairing: https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/RNMBY/RTX https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/RNMBY/RTX
- r00fus 2y agoAs long as Europe doesn't get dragged into the tariff tarpit that US has jumped into, I think they'll do much better.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- josefritzishere 2y agoBy virtue of not wasting time on drugs, mania and celebrity it looks like Eutelstat is poised to crush Starlink