I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting. Further, it will also be disadvantaged to anything closer with ability to choose a cable medium. All this adds up to the most expensive infrastructure that exclusively targets very low population density areas and/or areas too poor to afford good Internet. The people that could afford to sustain this can afford to move somewhere with a bit more infrastructure or at least within reach of a terrestrial tower and have an even better result.
That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)
So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.
But that’s not the only problem …
Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.
In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting.
I mean…so what if the birds only last 5-7 years? My only real concern is that they’re not made with environmentally damaging materials. Let them fall over the South Pacific and be atomized on the way down. It really depends on how cheaply you can launch them. All infrastructure has a finite life span. 5-7 years is lower than most terrestrial infrastructure, but this is all a function of launch costs. If those can be made cheap enough, the concept is perfectly viable.
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
I mean, the need for internet satellite is mostly in low density areas. In big cities fiber will always be cheaper and more reliable (except maybe in the US where operators are allowed to fuck you).
I hate Musk and I guess Starlink is squeezing their monopoly position right now, but I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).
To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.
I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, the satellites do “reasonably” boost themselves, they have propulsion on board.
After 5 years yes they trash them, but that nots not cost prohibitive for SpaceX. Starlink is brining in a significant amount of money, and it doesn’t cost SpaceX all that much to launch a new batch to replace the old. You all seem to forget they are the cheapest and most impressive launch company to date.
What you and nobody else seems to understand is that every year SpaceX is launching more and more rockets and they will only continue to increase their launch cadence. In the next one or two years, they will start using Starship for Starlink launches, and that will significantly increase the amount of bandwidth they can add to the network per lanch.
I’m sure I’ll get hate because I’m defending an elon company but everyone here is plain wrong and just making shit up.
The number of people willing to put up with the round trip latency to GEO is relatively small. They would only do it if there’s no other option. There aren’t enough customers to justify the kind of mass deployment Starlink needs to be profitable.
You can put lots of sats in a low orbit and get low latency, but then they either need to be replaced every few years (the kind of capital expenditure that companies are allergic to in the long run) or self-boosting (expensive, and still eventually need to be replaced). You can put them in a higher orbit, but latency goes up noticeably, you need even more sats for coverage, and it’s more expensive to put them there. You can put them in GEO and use fewer sats, but latency goes through the roof. These are the options orbital mechanics and current technology allows.
If we had a space elevator or similarly cheap way to access space, then it becomes more viable. Note that while Falcon 9 and Starship potentially make it viable to build one of the space megastructure ideas that have been floating around for decades, it would also crater SpaceX’s business model. Chemical rockets would build their own demise (at least for launching from Earth, and there are probably better technologies for scooting around the solar system once you’re up there). Musk likely knows that and would fight it.
Or you can build fiber to peoples homes and leave satellites for Antarctica or the Himalayas or such. That works, too.
I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
Closer to the latter than the former.
I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting. Further, it will also be disadvantaged to anything closer with ability to choose a cable medium. All this adds up to the most expensive infrastructure that exclusively targets very low population density areas and/or areas too poor to afford good Internet. The people that could afford to sustain this can afford to move somewhere with a bit more infrastructure or at least within reach of a terrestrial tower and have an even better result.
That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)
So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.
But that’s not the only problem …
Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.
In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.
Starlink is not a viable business.
I mean…so what if the birds only last 5-7 years? My only real concern is that they’re not made with environmentally damaging materials. Let them fall over the South Pacific and be atomized on the way down. It really depends on how cheaply you can launch them. All infrastructure has a finite life span. 5-7 years is lower than most terrestrial infrastructure, but this is all a function of launch costs. If those can be made cheap enough, the concept is perfectly viable.
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
That, and as they burn up upon re-entry, they’re fucking up the environment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-damage-earth-atmosphere
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
I mean, the need for internet satellite is mostly in low density areas. In big cities fiber will always be cheaper and more reliable (except maybe in the US where operators are allowed to fuck you). I hate Musk and I guess Starlink is squeezing their monopoly position right now, but I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).
To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.
I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.
Maybe a better answer is WiMax.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, the satellites do “reasonably” boost themselves, they have propulsion on board.
After 5 years yes they trash them, but that nots not cost prohibitive for SpaceX. Starlink is brining in a significant amount of money, and it doesn’t cost SpaceX all that much to launch a new batch to replace the old. You all seem to forget they are the cheapest and most impressive launch company to date.
What you and nobody else seems to understand is that every year SpaceX is launching more and more rockets and they will only continue to increase their launch cadence. In the next one or two years, they will start using Starship for Starlink launches, and that will significantly increase the amount of bandwidth they can add to the network per lanch.
I’m sure I’ll get hate because I’m defending an elon company but everyone here is plain wrong and just making shit up.
☝️ spitting facts. people love to hate, and complain about the “other side” being delusional. turns out, we ALL can be a little delusional.
Yep. Spitting facts like degenerative AI.
Hallucinated facts.
Not everyone needs super low latency. Satellite phones exist for a reason.
The number of people willing to put up with the round trip latency to GEO is relatively small. They would only do it if there’s no other option. There aren’t enough customers to justify the kind of mass deployment Starlink needs to be profitable.
You can put lots of sats in a low orbit and get low latency, but then they either need to be replaced every few years (the kind of capital expenditure that companies are allergic to in the long run) or self-boosting (expensive, and still eventually need to be replaced). You can put them in a higher orbit, but latency goes up noticeably, you need even more sats for coverage, and it’s more expensive to put them there. You can put them in GEO and use fewer sats, but latency goes through the roof. These are the options orbital mechanics and current technology allows.
If we had a space elevator or similarly cheap way to access space, then it becomes more viable. Note that while Falcon 9 and Starship potentially make it viable to build one of the space megastructure ideas that have been floating around for decades, it would also crater SpaceX’s business model. Chemical rockets would build their own demise (at least for launching from Earth, and there are probably better technologies for scooting around the solar system once you’re up there). Musk likely knows that and would fight it.
Or you can build fiber to peoples homes and leave satellites for Antarctica or the Himalayas or such. That works, too.
Too many words. What did you want to say exactly?
Wonderful. They can just talk to their server on the phone