5 ms·
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely. Last year, wh
by jampa 3mo ago
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
- palmotea 3mo ago> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation. There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
- luke5441 3mo agoAnd for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives. To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.
- ianm218 3mo agoIndia is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.
- luke5441 3mo agoSame as Russia, yeah. But Reliance Jio seems to have announced something. Don't know if it'll actually happen.
- ianm218 3mo agoYeah who knows poor infrastructure might let India skip fiber in some areas entirely. Maybe it’s not that hard to launch a domestic Starlink if Blue Origin/ SpaceX will bring your satellites up cheaply .
- wolvoleo 3mo agoThey have nukes and are always on the verge of war with Pakistan (who also have nukes). I'm sure they have money for war, everyone always does.
- triceratops 3mo agoThey have an actual space program that launches actual satellites. They have also been in several actual, non-hypothetical wars.
- tw1984 3mo agoTo launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement. To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
- overfeed 3mo agoIndia was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.
- wqaatwt 3mo ago> the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.
- overfeed 3mo agoHow many[1] others? Not many countries can claim that achievement, industrialized or not, which is telling. 1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency
- wqaatwt 3mo agoHow many countries can claim the achievement of developing nuclear weapons? Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany? Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)
- adityamwagh 3mo agoWhat makes you think india is "super super" poor? India's GDP is humongous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...).
- kortilla 3mo agoThe denominator
- antonvs 3mo agoThe page you need to look at is GDP per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... …which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.
- triceratops 3mo agoThat only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.
- eldaisfish 3mo agoIndia's total exports are in the same ballpark as the Netherlands, a country with half the population of the city of Bombay. India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.
- adityamwagh 3mo agoYes, GDP doesn't say anything about the individual wealth. But we are talking about the whole country here.
- numpad0 3mo agoThe problem with LEO constellation is wasted airtime outside of the country that owns it. Starlink just let anyone pay for the service irrespective of legality and let the leftovers go to waste, but most sane people can't accept that model. They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.
- drysine 3mo ago>And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives. I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.
- 0xffff2 3mo agoMeanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure. Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
- consumer451 3mo agoI was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up: > Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company. So, where does the rest of the valuation come from? It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
- 0xffff2 3mo agoAccording to SpaceX itself 93% of the company's value is in AI IIRC.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- t-writescode 3mo agoGod I hope not. That’s terrifying.
- lokar 3mo ago99% of the value is goodwill towards musk
- tormeh 3mo agoThere are areas where the bureaucratic hurdles to changing anything and the incentives for changing anything work out to nothing ever changing. I assume in 20 years most of Berlin is still going to have 50mbit/s max. I hear residents of New York have completely given up and are using 5G modems because putting up new cables just isn't practical. On the other hand, these cities do have a significant minority of flats with gigabit internet, so if you care you can pick a modern building with modern cabling. Maybe the segment who both live in old apartments and also are willing to pay for fast internet is too small to bother with.
- Lomlioto 3mo agoWhile i would love to have 1 gb, 50mbit is not bad and every normal person i know of, wouldn't call it bad at all or see it as an issue. So not a problem
- leptons 3mo agoNot just cruise ships, but practically every boat with a bed in it. People sailing on small boats all around the world have starlink now. It's kind of a game changer in a lot of ways for small boats.
- roysting 3mo agoAs with the data centers, starlink is not actually what people think it is. There’s a military purpose underlying its public front
- grommz 3mo ago[dead]