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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#451

Post by mschuster91 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #441
xvilka wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will constellation completion and intersatellite links expand the reach to polar areas as well? It would be a game changer for Arctic and Antarctic.

Looking at the orbits for Starlink, they are currently not flying over the north / south pole directly. I don't know if there's plans to do so later, probably if the investments start to pay off and they can afford more launches and sattelites. But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.

> But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.

Given that the estimated cost of building and launching the satellites is estimated at only 600 million dollars [1], it is estimated to take something around two or three years until it's been paid off, followed by two years of generating profit and the next five-year cycle starts (assuming that their estimate of five years life time per satellite holds [2]).

Personally, I think Starlink was the best bet SpaceX ever made. That thing will be a permanent cash cow.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/02/14/starlin...

[2] https://subspace.com/resources/spacex-is-giving-the-internet...

Re: Starlink Maritime

#452

Post by FeepingCreature »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #427
shaklee3 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.

I'm just going to throw some numbers out here. edit: MASSIVE miscalculation fixed! Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's r…

I can't edit anymore, so correction: Current sats only have 6y lifespan, which drops us to 1.3 billion yearly, but I think that's partially cause they're still iterating on them. It seems clear that satellite lifespan is the main factor for profit.

edit: I've put up a Guesstimate Model: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/20609

Re: Starlink Maritime

#453

Post by mschuster91 »

dylan604 wrote: post #372
paranoidrobot wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals. Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance. There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to dep…

>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too. Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?

> Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?

The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#454

Post by michaelt »

lxgr wrote: post #325
jpgvm wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity. Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat. Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise -…

Iridium was the first network to successfully operate inter-satellite links more than 20 years ago. I wouldn't call it "considerably less advanced". Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.

If it's 20 years older with orders of magnitude less bandwidth, I can see why someone might call it less advanced.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#455

Post by sdfjkl »

obloid wrote: post #108

I've been looking forward to marine starlink with the thought of being able to work remotely while sailing. Then I saw the pricing! I guess they're aiming for the megayacht crowd not average shmoes on small boats. Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...

Requiring an unobstructed view of the sky is pretty incompatible with sailboats anyways, unless you stick it at the top of the mast (where I expect it won't last long).

Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#456

Post by dghughes »

BurningFrog wrote: post #77
_Microft wrote: post #7

The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation. Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lo…

> That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.

Starlink should rent space on oil rigs at least those areas could have a "ground station" in a way. Oil rigs don't have physical undersea comm lines to land. But it can be a repeater since more power available on a rig.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#457

Post by [deleted] »

jerrysievert wrote: post #324
walrus01 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would ask two things: a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need…

> a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to…

[deleted]

Re: Starlink Maritime

#458

Post by jcims »

cptaj wrote: post #222
jwagenet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me confused, but if these satellites are not geostationary, why are the both the inland coverage and coastal coverage mostly limited to political boundaries? Shouldn't coverage be available anywhere there are satellites overhead?

Like other mention, its regulatory. But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations. I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have p…

The user terminals have a GPS receiver in them and would be able to determine where they are in the world with attendant precision. This would allow SpaceX to enforce fine-grained availability restrictions.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#459

Post by pclmulqdq »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #427
shaklee3 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.

I'm just going to throw some numbers out here. edit: MASSIVE miscalculation fixed! Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's r…

This calculation illustrates the problems of subtracting a big number from another big number.

Here's some of my math:

* Each customer brings in $1.2k/year.

* Satellites have 20 gbps of bandwidth, and consumers today are reporting about 50 mbps links.

* Maximum capacity is then ~1000 customers/sat because a 50 mbps connection takes 100 mbps of capacity to run duplex, and you need to double that again because customer data needs to get to backhaul.

* Satellites will spend significant time over water, and even more time over people who aren't paying - remember, metro areas all have cheaper cable internet. I would give these ~10% capacity at most.

* Satellites have 5 year life, but some fraction of them fail early - let's say that averages to 4 year replacement, and that estimate is at the high end of Musk's original estimate.

* One satellite is capable of $1.2M annual revenue, assuming 100% utilization, or $5M revenue over its life.

* Satellites cost $250k to manufacture, and $1M to launch ($50M per launch of 50 sats, making the math simple). Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.

* The profitability of a single satellite is heavily dependent on utilization: At 10% utilization, each satellite makes $500k of revenue over its life. Satellites have to run at 30% utilization to break even.

* Customers receive a ~$1k subsidy to access the network in terms of the discount on the dish. This means we have 1 year per customer to break even on the customer. Assuming 3 year customer/dish lifetime (and assuming we will subsidize dish replacements when they break), we have only ~$2k margin per customer over 3 years, or $700 per year amortized.

* Now, the per-satellite gross margin drops to around $3-3.5M. This means that you now need up to 50% utilization to break even on a satellite.

What this all means is that starlink, if it is ever profitable, will be profitable based on niche use cases where they can charge extremely high subscription prices. Use cases like airplanes, yachts, offshore oil platforms, and military deployments. Customers who aren't paying a lot per subscription are dead weight.

By making slightly different assumptions, we have dramatically different conclusions.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#460

Post by legolas2412 »

ncmncm wrote: post #355
elif wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.

They announced they are not launching any more v1s, and they cannot launch v2s on current hardware. That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.

They also said that v2 has 5x more weight, and 10x more "capacity". Not sure what capacity is, and why falcon 9 isn't enough for something that's giving them 2x more "capacity" per unit mass.
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