331–340 of 631 posts
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Delta’s ViaSat based Wireless is fine . The latency is hire. But it really isn’t a competitive disadvantage.
If Starlink becomes common enough on flights, I absolutely believe it will be a competitive disadvantage.
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Well if you make the argument that it will replace terrestrial networks and that's why its worth X trillion $ then yes, you do actually need to cover the 1% of earth surface where the waste majority of people actually spend most of their time. The question is not if its a good business, the question if its a 2 trillion $ business, and if you only cover the 95% of earth without coverage. That more like a couple 100 bi…
I never said it would replace terrestrial networks... you invented that claim yourself and are responding to a strawman. Starlink mobile is for rural areas, and the other 90% of the planet that's not well served by traditional terrestrial networks. And 40% of earth's population live in rural areas, so there is a large market for this kind of service.
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Which is a synonym for impossible. As far as the latest serious analyses have shown, data centers in space are a pipe dream. Starlink’s total addressable market was also shown to be way smaller than expected. The IPO in this case just signals they’re desperate for liquidity and with no clear path to profitability, if you discount unlikely, major breakthroughs happening very soon. They’re changing the rules of stock i…
Could you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.
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Their technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches? I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility. Barring that, until we have…
Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society. We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust. Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareho…
Only boring stable companies that have no growth like Coca-Cola make sense only valuing without further growth.
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They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time. No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much. I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people. I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly push…
The internet had just blown up. CompSci programs at major universities were still teaching Fortran and COBOL. Linux had its very first release in 1991 I think (when the initial Google folks were in high school), people knew what BSD stood for back then, web protocols were not horribly dissimilar to the Wild West, and don’t even get me started on web standards.
In addition to all of that, they actually fixed search. There was this golden era where searching worked. The other responses you’ve had so far are much more enlightening than mine, I’m spent. I didn’t meant to come off as an ass, it’s interesting to hear your perspective on this.
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If Starlink becomes common enough on flights, I absolutely believe it will be a competitive disadvantage.
would you choose a flight that's $200 more expensive because it has starlink?
You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch. The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price. Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock. You might say this is an obvious flaw in…
I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about. Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
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Delta’s ViaSat based Wireless is fine . The latency is hire. But it really isn’t a competitive disadvantage.
If Starlink becomes common enough on flights, I absolutely believe it will be a competitive disadvantage.
Frequent flyers choose their airlines for a lot of reasons - which airline has the most direct flights from their city, who has the best frequent flyer program, etc. The latency of the Internet is seldom a factor or the difference between 10Mbps and 50Mbps.
Non frequent flyers just buy the cheapest flights. The major three airlines make money off of business travelers, business and first class flights and credit cards.
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$16B is the top line gross revenue number. You don't count R&D as an expense per GAAP, so... They have claimed $8B in EBITDA, also leaving out the amortization of R&D costs. Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know.
No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol