101–110 of 162 posts
Shotwell said the company’s board of directors in 2012 realized the profit margins from the commercial satellites it was launching for customers were “much higher” than SpaceX’s launch business. Musk estimates Starlink could generate more than $30 billion per year – at least 10 times what SpaceX could bring in at best from its launch business.
What other customers businesses will they seek to cannibalize next?
The money quote imo, I haven't read this explicitly stated before: Shotwell said the company’s board of directors in 2012 realized the profit margins from the commercial satellites it was launching for customers were “much higher” than SpaceX’s launch business. Musk estimates Starlink could generate more than $30 billion per year – at least 10 times what SpaceX could bring in at best from its launch business. What ot…
Goodbye amateur astronomy https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1...
Also, this being a composite image, I'm assuming it is from multiple exposures. Can the software that merges the images together also filter out the satellites? And how is it that just 60 satellites do this, but the 2000 or so currently in orbit don't exhibit this behavior?
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> I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Google stopped deploying fiber for several reasons: a) they weren't able to get reasonable access to poles for deployment. b) incumbents started large rollouts of gigabit capable services (FTTH from telcos and DOCSIS 3.1 from cablecos) in markets Google had announced, but hadn't built out c) maybe? lots more LTE deployment
Also, they weren't very good at it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... "When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it." ... "AT&T has been using various forms of shallow trenching since 2009 and hasn't seen similar issues."
Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
> decent latency
pick one
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I've been having this hard to articulate notion that humanity hasn't really begun to fathom the changes that will come with "cheap" launch vehicles. We have better than half a century where space launch was so expensive, and so rare, that this had an impact on the payloads themselves. Perversely it caused the payloads to become so highly engineered (for a variety of reasons) that they also became ultra-expensive in-l…
Soon (a decade or two) every major corporation and organization will have a manned station of their own.
Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
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20 Gbps per satellite, according to the FCC filings. Which isn't that great.
Netflix claims an UHD stream is 25 Mbps. This is probably the most demanding use case for your average consumer, but it may not be a rare use case in the near future. Each satellite can support 800 UHD streams. That doesn't seem sufficient if each satellite covers a large geographic area. This suggests to me a low data cap and/or rate, perhaps comparable to DSL.
12000 * 20Gbps / 2 * 100 / 100Mbps / 3 = 40,000,000 customers
A service like that could sell for a lot in rural North America, but maybe not to 40m customers. Let's assume most of those customers are from lower income countries or from places with more competitive ISP environments. Maybe $20/mo average revenue per customer. That's $800m a month. That already sounds compelling to me, before considering the potential for more or higher bandwidth satellites, or for higher margin commercial or government contracts.
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Sorry to rain on your parade. But Starlink will never be competing with internet in urban areas. The economics for simply laying a few miles of fiber are too good (if the fiber isn't even already there). More so the satellite density needed to serve an entire city is many more than even SpaceX is proposing. Starlink is for long distance backhaul and for rural/underserved areas.
If starlink allows roaming high speed internet, then I would be willing to pay for that instead of a fiber line.