111–120 of 127 posts
So who will buy their assets for pennies on the dollar and keep going?
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They aren't in a low orbit, the decay time is a lot more than 25 years.
Usually at the end of their life, the owners intentional change their orbit to burn them up. I’m not sure about OneWeb, but most of the new satellite internet companies are/were planning low orbit satellites to keep latency down.
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Almost all bankruptcies in the next two years are going to blame COVID-19. "It wasn't us, it was the $external_factor" is a way for management to avoid blame. In some cases (restaurants especially) the health crisis has wrecked businesses that have been profitable for many years and the external factor is legitimately the main cause. In other instances, the company was already headed toward bankruptcy and the virus i…
This is highly opinionated, since I don't know Greg Wyler at all, but I do remember his Terracom broadband satellite effort in Rwanda, which looked noble at first, but was more a pretext to pay himself a generous salary, than doing anything. So when he started OneWeb and then Ob3 (or vice-versa) I was skeptical. Now, reading about OW, and how it was mostly a middleman, I would say I am not surprised at all that he wo…
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I grew up in a rural area. We had dial-up for years until we got point to point wireless, which capped out at 1.5 mbps. 3 of my team members live in a rural area and have similar internet. They’re all waiting to throw money at spacex as soon as it goes live. There’s millions of people in the US like them that would sign up. My wife and I are planning to move further from the city, but one of our concerns is getting d…
"My wife and I are planning to move further from the city, but one of our concerns is getting decent internet (we have symmetric gigabit fiber now)." Exactly my situation. I have symmetric gigabit and due to a nature of my business requiring symmetric fat pipe I have to live in a city. The minute I could get that gigabit in a wilderness I am out.
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I think Elon has been talking about floating ground stations. Not sure if that is even viable. My best guess is that ships, at least ocean going ships, will stay with GEO operators for the time being.
Starlink is planning on adding laser links to the satellites so that when one satellite is out of range of a ground station it can beam packets to other satellites that are in range of a ground station.
Interesting times.
I don't think it's exactly fair of them to blame "financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19" for their bankruptcy. The history of space industry is full of companies that ran out of money when attempting to launch massive satellite constellations. And let's be frank, an attempt to out-compete SpaceX on mass satellite production and cheap launches was doomed to fail.
Almost all bankruptcies in the next two years are going to blame COVID-19. "It wasn't us, it was the $external_factor" is a way for management to avoid blame. In some cases (restaurants especially) the health crisis has wrecked businesses that have been profitable for many years and the external factor is legitimately the main cause. In other instances, the company was already headed toward bankruptcy and the virus i…
This is one in 10 years chance to reprice failed aqusitions, investments went bad, mismanaged opportunities etc. And blame unpredictable, external circumstances.
If we are to show loss on a quarterly report let it be large one-time figure. Heck we can even qualify for some bailout money.
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Rural internet is expensive because no PRIVATE company wants to put up a tower or run fiber for a couple dozen people. A satellite covers a much wider area. We'll see how it plays out, but as a person living out here, I'm excited.
It worked for our neighborhood. A retired engineer down the road did exactly this- started a private company to provide good wireless P2P internet to our rural, mountainous community. He’s about 7 years in and now serves 70% of our area. It ain’t cheap, but he’s been profitable enough now to be able to buy additional bandwidth from his upstream. We’re about to get 50/25 in the coming months. I offer my services to hi…
Initially I had setup a PTP link at 3 km with MikroTik gear and got 10-20 Mbps, varying wildly. I actually subscribed to an Internet connection over DSL in a building where I don't live and got permission to put an antenna and modem there to send Internet to my house. Later I subscribed to an actual Internet company, doubting my own skills in setting up the link. They don't offer anything over 10 Mbps, but I asked for them to let me have an unlimited link for an hour, and it did the same 10-20 Mbps with Ubiquiti gear.
Some WISPs use Cambium gear and apparently do offer 50 Mbps, but I'm not quite sure how well does that work, and how much better is Cambium, or i.e. Mimosa, compared to UBNT/MTik.
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It looks like Oneweb first received funding in January 2015. It looks like they had started working on the idea in 2014. (Per Wikipedia) SpaceX's first propulsive landing attempt was September 2013, by the end of 2014 they had twice succeeded at controlled descents over the ocean. Their first landing on a solid surface (i.e. actual recovery of the booster) was late 2015. So yes, there weren't yet reusable rockets, bu…
> the writing was very clearly on the wall. With the gift of hindsight that's true, but I disagree, it wasn't clear back then . Keep in mind that the concept of reusable rockets has been around ever since the first rocket launch around the 1960's, and we (humanity) threw away the entire thing. It took SpaceX to make reusable rockets real, but not for lack of trying on the part of Lockheed Martin and other defense con…
This is in no way true. When SpaceX was working on F9 reuse, their business was (very) profitable at their launch prices. They are still pricing F9 launches at a point where the launches would be profitable if every launch was expendable. Reusability was not what they needed to win -- it was the victory lap after they had already won.
There is a lot of fud arguing otherwise based on external estimates, but they all fail to take into account that the internal cost of F9 is only less than a fifth of what all the competitors pay for their comparable rockets. The reason is that SpaceX is extremely vertically integrated, and every component that goes into their rockets is heavily optimized for cost first and performance second.
For example, most other American launchers use RL-10's for their upper stage engines. There is a good reason for this -- RL-10 with it's best-in-class Isp is quite possibly the best upper stage engine that exists. However, this comes at a rather steep cost that is not public knowledge but was in 2017 estimated to be ~$25M. The costs of the rocket engines on a F9 is not public knowledge either, but is known to be less than $500k each, or at most ~$5M total.
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Doesn't work like that. Each starlink satellite has capacity of 20gig/sec. Assume that only 1 or 2 of the sats will be over a major metro area at any one time - that's 40gig/sec total capacity. That's only ~5,000 HD netflix streams at once (even less for 4K). It will soon become totally overloaded. A city like NYC probably has home/office bandwidth use of 40gig/sec per a few city blocks, nevermind the whole metro are…
Yes, but cities have FTTH, rural areas have.. often times nothing that approaches >5 Mbps.
My point wasn't that it doesn't make sense whatsoever, it's just that it is going to be a niche solution. Considering the insane capex of getting the sats in space, if the market is too niche, will it be able to pay back the capex costs?
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Yes, but cities have FTTH, rural areas have.. often times nothing that approaches >5 Mbps.
Yes, of course. But how big of a market is that really? I imagine the market is actually pretty small, considering a lot of rural areas have semi-workable 4G coverage, and others have small wireless p2p ISPs. My point wasn't that it doesn't make sense whatsoever, it's just that it is going to be a niche solution. Considering the insane capex of getting the sats in space, if the market is too niche, will it be able to…
You can't know until you do extensive market research.
>a lot of rural areas have semi-workable 4G coverage
Yes, but also extremely restrictive data caps and expensive overage fees per kilobyte.
>small wireless p2p ISPs
Yes, that would be the biggest competition to LEO satellite broadband. However, PTMP (point to multipoint) WISP requires line of sight and expensive CPEs to reach speeds over 20 Mbps for more than 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles). There is still shared capacity, and RF noise problems (as with satellites).
>it is going to be a niche solution
Unfortunately, yes. And if it ever gets anywhere near to being profitable and threatening the traditional fixed access telcos, they'll just spend some pennies (compared to revenue), lay fiber to most of the residences, and do a mix of FTTH and FTTC (VDSL2 with profile 35b for up to 50 Mbps at 1km (0.6 miles) or 350 Mbps at 100 m (0.06 miles)) to save costs for users who have good-enough-quality twisted pair telephone lines but are too far from the DSLAM to get good speeds.
VDSL2 is quite servicable, it is unclear to me why is it so underutilized in the USA. DSL is a dedicated service, since the telephone line isn't shared with multiple people nor multiplexed in any way, so it provides a very stable connection, if the speed is conservatively set per the line's maximum length.