soooo good that they'll burn up one day and this nonsense can finally end.
investors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital.
sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!
"...we're good." ?
It seems that you are excluding all of the actual users onboard with Starlink tech. I'm one. I had choices and Starlink was a welcome addition to the short list.
In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.
Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.
Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...
Are you maybe swayed to make public comments regarding Starlink and other SpaceX products because of your political opinions instead of facts? This is a valid and sincere question, not an accusation.
Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...
well .0014 is 40% more than 0.001, so it isn't THAT close.
Although even if we grant you your assumption about 99.9%, doesn't this show that you can still have a business if that is true? 12 million customers is a sustainable business.
You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?
Would be nice for oil and gas companies to pay for all the emissions say, starting when they found out about it and decided to lie to the public. Maybe also bring charges against the PR firms they used since given those same PR firms worked for the tobacco industry clearly they won't stop until there are consequences.
The satellites aren't worse. It is the rockets that are worse. On the way up they emit various things into the stratosphere, which is about the worst place you can emit stuff when it comes to affecting the atmosphere.
It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.
(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).
You may want to compare the flight profiles of jets and rockets, what layers of the atmosphere they emit in, and how the effects of the things they omit vary by where in the atmosphere they are emitted.
When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.
While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.
Yeah who knows poor infrastructure might let India skip fiber in some areas entirely. Maybe it’s not that hard to launch a domestic Starlink if Blue Origin/ SpaceX will bring your satellites up cheaply .
To launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement.
To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch.
That only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.
The problem with LEO constellation is wasted airtime outside of the country that owns it. Starlink just let anyone pay for the service irrespective of legality and let the leftovers go to waste, but most sane people can't accept that model.
They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.
>And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.
I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.
Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.
Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
I mean, it was a response to a claim, without evidence, that it was valuable.
Is your position that _you_ can make assertions without evidence but that lesser mortals may not contradict you without writing a paper on the subject?
I’m convinced that a large part of the user base of this site is genuinely, literally, solipsistic.
The simple answer is that SpaceX is worth about 1900 billion dollars at today's stock price. It's the 7th most valuable company on Earth.
According to an AI I asked, about 50% of that value is Starlink, with space launches and AI making up about 25% each.
The Starlink business depends on their cheap space launch tech, so using these rough numbers capability I'd say it is worth 75% of the company, or $1400B.
And i brought an argument. You said it makes space-x very valuable and i explain that the amount of payload we even send up is very limited which contracditcs 'very valuable'.
I then explain further what Elon Musks plan is to sell us his trillion dollar company or how you frame it 'very valuable' and explain why it doesn't work
> there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure
The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.
I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.
With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.
There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.
In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
it is well known that Australia has an extremely lazy workforce that refuse to put in any real work.
the best example here is the stupid residential building cost. nowadays it costs over $1m AUD or $700k USD do a first floor 2bedroom 1 bathroom extension for an existing house in good condition. That is significantly more expensive than building a big house in the US.
I'm fairly sure there are also houses in Australia being built for less than $1m AUD given there are new houses being sold for less than $1m AUD with no indication those developers are making a loss.
nice straw man, you can of course find houses below $1m when you go to regional areas where job opportunities simply do not exist. how about you just compare construction cost in Sydney with say those expensive part of the US, e.g. LA and SF?
let's don't even start on the quality of those new builds, that would be the laughing stock of the entire world.
There are areas where the bureaucratic hurdles to changing anything and the incentives for changing anything work out to nothing ever changing. I assume in 20 years most of Berlin is still going to have 50mbit/s max. I hear residents of New York have completely given up and are using 5G modems because putting up new cables just isn't practical. On the other hand, these cities do have a significant minority of flats with gigabit internet, so if you care you can pick a modern building with modern cabling. Maybe the segment who both live in old apartments and also are willing to pay for fast internet is too small to bother with.
Not just cruise ships, but practically every boat with a bed in it. People sailing on small boats all around the world have starlink now. It's kind of a game changer in a lot of ways for small boats.
India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.
India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.
I feel like no-earth orbit is always going to beat out low-earth orbit in the long-term. I live an area that the USDA classifies as rural and I now have multiple fiber options, including municipal. This isn't to say that Starlink doesn't have its place and I only see it becoming more niche over time and facing more competition in the LEO segment.
I live in what is probably the first place to get these things in the world, but it feels like fiber is being built at an extremely rapid pace. Just in the past couple of years it seems like Google and AT&T fiber went from being a relatively confined thing to being available everywhere in the city, and everywhere outside, and at my friend's ranch 100 miles in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere.
Given that fiber's been around for literal decades, though, and the Internet hasn't recently gotten more popular or anything, why would this suddenly have changed? I could believe what people are saying re. Starlink providing competition and finally incentivizing fiber buildouts
Elon listen to this guy, shut it down, he got fiber and switched so bring the satellites down, it's not going to work. Hackernews has become like reddit, shame it used to be good, now it's an Elon bashing woke echo chamber.
Exactly. Central Europe is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet outside of Asia. High population density makes fiber more economical, and low population density, the inverse. As other la have pointed out, India actually has very deep fiber penetration exactly for this reason. The Americas, by contrast, are largely devoid of people which makes the economics of any networking infrastructure harder
There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet
Ships and jets are different segments from residential. Planes are definitely a textbook use case for satellite internet, but just like airlines are in a race-to-the-bottom for everything from in-flight snacks to legroom, they're not going to spring for premier high-quality internet service, they're just going to scrape by with the bare minimum. The market potential is not spectacularly impressive. Meanwhile, for residential services, rural areas continue to shrink, the people remaining in rural areas tend to be poorer, and the rural areas where rich people live have fiber, because the rich people can pay for it. Satellite internet will remain a crucial service for certain rural populations, but it's not going to take over the world.
Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.
Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.
There's many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.
The sailing-around-the-world (and similar) market is obviously miniscule. The isolated communities probably tend to be on the less affluent part of the world, so it doesn't seem to justify a 100x expansion.
I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.
However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizen's data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.
Yes, but those are different reasons. Eventually we'll have many different providers offering LEO internet. Competition is the best way to solve this. The benefits of LEO internet is obvious.
No, I disagree. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when the GMaps labelled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was bunk. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.
Internet routing around nuclear war not because it's cable but it's because it's an inter connected network (ie "internet"). Meaning there's multiple routes to the same destination.
Starlink can now jump the connections satellite to satellite, and curve them around the planet. You need to knock out not just the nearest ground station but also the stations the traffic can be rerouted to for the constellation to be meaningfully degraded. Stations that are spread across multiple countries and continents.
In which case, yes, SpaceX can also spin up new makeshift ground stations using off the shelf user terminals.
The current ground stations use specialized transceivers, but that's an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental limitation.
> I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable.
There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.
It's not impossible that you truly are, but it is unlikely.
I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.
This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.
Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.
Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.
So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.
Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.
Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.
Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.
And the satellite internet business has been a dog since forever.
Even starlink only makes sense if you ignore the absolutely immense capital investment in it. And they're probably hiding losses in the launch division considering it's losing money despite 80% of its business being launching starlink satellites (they blame starship but that was supposed to be funded by NASA).
> > And the satellite internet business has been a dog since forever.
So is the nuclear reactor business but at least with that you gain independence from Iran whereas the satellite dog business gives you independence from the tyrant T-mobile or Verizon...
Same. I bought a cabin, which had the equivalent of pretty good DSL. I got starlink and immediately cancelled it when 2gbps fiber arrived 9mo later. Fiber is rolling out faster than a lot of people think.
Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and precarious. Since starlink it's a breeze. We will finally be able to get video feeds off of some of the stations; a totally untenable concept before.
Sure, and that's great, but this is an extremely small niche case right? No one is denying that there are some cases where Starlink is amazing, but niche products don't usually command a $1T value.
It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.
The mobile applications, particularly in the case of airline aircraft, have also been compelling and worth a lot of money to SpaceX.
Starlink has also brought broadband Internet to a vast number of people that would not have had it otherwise. This will boost the worldwide economy by an enormous amount.
I don't think rurp was saying there is no market, just that there was no obvious realistic TAM worth 1.6 trillion (going by the amount given by the S-1). How many people living remotely in an area with no fibre do you really expect there to be?
Starlink only has 10 Million customers, too expensive for most countries already.
Starlink brought internet to a lot of people who had it before already but made it easier for them.
Its still quite a interesting technology, given, but for the fact that he destroys potentially our atmosphere, has control over war critical tech, can do survailance and wants to send out A Lot MORE into our space, its a net negative for at least 7-8 BILLION people while 10 Millionen people benefit from it.
And they even increased the price just a few weeks back...
It’s a niche, yes, but there could be others like it. No idea about how the company should be valued. We pay them chump change for our services, but enough that with any scale it could be meaningful. And their reach is pretty incredible, so, there is a lot of potential there.
I mean, it’s actually not that bad of a play at least here in AK.
There’s billions of dollars in monitoring and maintaining remote sites / handling remote connectivity, doing bespoke SaaS tools, etc. Like, literally high hundreds of millions or low billions.
Note that I am not claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.
> There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast.
I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
FWIW it may be tenable now as Starlink has gotten much better at tree/obstruction avoidance in the signal and will preemptively switch the satellite it's using when an obstruction is approaching. Id check again.
Elon turning off Russian access to Starlink by whitelisting only authorized terminals in the region was a turning point for Ukraine's success. The conflict has proven that modern warfare depends on Starlink and its mimics.
'A new piece of electronic warfare equipment appears more precisely targeted, apparently capable of jamming Starlink terminals on the ground across an area of up to 20 square kilometers.'
Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.
Stop using Telstra then. There’s an abundance of NBN resellers who sell better packages for cheaper than Telstra. At this point Telstra is just for old people who don’t want to change the services they’ve always been with.
If you compare 100/40 plans to starlink, starlink is about 10aud more over the best reseller promotion I can see, but has the occasional promotion; and getting cheaper.
If you are churning plans anyway, and that's the speed you want, you should have starlink in the mix.
I fully expect the NBN wholesale to keep getting more expensive, while I expect satellite providers to get cheaper.
I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.
They aren't, at least not yet. It's more a reflection of how bad internet service is in places you wouldn't think it would be, at least here in the states. My as-advertised gigabit cable service slows to an utter crawl around Netflix O'Clock, And multi-hour+ outages are a regular occurrence.
Regarding latency, starlink satellites are low enough that it just isn't an issue.
I had a hilarious interaction with a Spectrum technician when I was dealing with an oversubscribed node with my home service (same issue you're describing here).
He was a line tech and was fully aware that my slowness wasn't related to the line, and as he replaced all the lines to my house he enthusiastically recommended that I report the company to the FTC and demand a refund for the service degradation which wasn't meeting their advertised speeds. He actually gave me great advice for getting my case escalated and I was refunded for several months on my service.
They eventually got the node upgraded (I was once struggling to get 60Mbps down on the same line I'm getting >1G on today), and they're upgrading everything to DOCSIS 4.0 currently. I'm not trying to sell you on them, just saying they'll likely work their problems out in the long run. Fundamentally, coax line connection's floor is Starlink's ceiling as long as the nodes are able to keep up.
The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).
Crews on those ships are spending nearly all their time maintaining them.
Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots
This idea that putting $500m+ of assets in the water, but thinking that even one person on the boat is too many has got to be one of the silliest things in modern capitalism (obviously the crown goes to orbital AI data centers).
The same bosses will pay multiple security guards, in addition to staff, to guard <$10m in goods at a Walmart. But when 50x the goods are in the ocean, suddenly the staff is the limiter?
Yeah, autonomous shipping makes sense for naval/coastguard drones but not much else. Shipping companies can pay most of the staff Filipino wages, and they run around doing all sorts of maintenance tasks, not just navigation and contro.
Now the crew will be very pleased if they get a Starlink connection rather than the ridiculously small crew connectivity allowance Inmarsat et al will give them, but that all depends on shipping companies not having to pay premium prices for maritime connectivity.
Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.
And this is all before they launch a phone or something and wipe out global telecoms in one stroke, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative which are both completely plausible and lucrative.
It's not that simple. Yes, newer standards push for higher frequencies to get more bandwidth, but 5G for example also uses the old sub GHz bands with excellent range and penetration.
Often the bigger difference is just that fiber never goes in a straight line, even if it’s going to the right city. All that pesky geography gets in the way and makes the path longer.
As far as I can tell it almost exclusively follows the existing roads in Europe. Probably an easier way to secure rights in one go like rails used to be for telco lines.
If you were smart about it then you wouldn’t go up in the mountains in the first place. To get the lowest possible latency you want a straight shot, so obviously you should just bore your way through at the level of the plains on either side.
Unless you're trying to do something like high frequency stock trading, this does not really matter. Most of the added latency is added in the hops themselves, as packets are being classified and routed. Your generic Internet user won't be able to see any difference.
You need to take error into account, too. Can atmospheric conditions corrupt the transmission (this is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know)? If so then your latency and bandwidth will both suffer.
EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.
Given the size of the ocean (ie, there's so many other places that a ship can drop anchor other than right on a cable), I would assume this would be intentional sabotage any time it happens.
For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net. We allocate a significant amount of launch capacity to our Connectivity segment, and expect to allocate a significant amount to our AI segment in the future. Our Space segment revenue only reflects our customer launches and customer activities.
For launches dedicated to deploying our Starlink satellites, we capitalize the associated costs within our Connectivity segment and depreciate them over time, and we do not recognize revenue for those launches in our Space segment.
The launch cost for Starlink is in the connectivity segment. It has to go somewhere on your balance sheet and you can't magic it away.
If you manufacture cement and you also sell premixed concrete in another division it's a similar thing. Or any other company that sells both raw material and finished product.
Here they are saying it's in the connectivity segment costs instead of them buying it at retail. That's all there is.
That's how analysts can estimate launch costs ~$20MM and $600k for satellites as opposed to the idea that launch is $0 for Starlink and the cost is hidden in the space segment.
Yeah but it doesn't become a Trillion dollar business if they don't solve the Starlink Satelite v3 issue.
They need Starship to be able to send v3 up, without v3 it doesn't scale well enough.
Starship still hasn't proven it can actually bring up the relevant payload high enough and they need it to be reusable otherwise costs will increase.
And they already exist and only have 10 Million customers. They need to get countries on their side like India but these countries are not stupid. Elon Musk showed them very clearly what he can do like his statements he did when Ukraine war started.
> The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small
People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.
When I was a teenager in early post-Communist Czechia, Internet connection was also expensive. So what we did was that we pooled resources. Five or ten households had a common connection and shared it.
I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.
That is great, but it also sets the stage for actual fiber to be drawn as it is vastly cheaper to connect to an existing end user network than to build it up from scratch. When a critical mass of villages have built internal networks it will be worth drawing cable for them as well.
Lack of sufficient population density and political instability is what would stop this.
> would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.
People vastly underestimate the subjective importance of the Internet for people. 10-20% of the total income seems like a very realistic figure, even if it means spending some days hungry.
People vastly overestimate the subjective importance of the internet if they think people with relatively little historic exposure too and practical use for the internet would rather go hungry or have a worse marriage for their daughter to replace the erratic internet connection on their phone and cybercafe use with a high speed broadband connection in their house...
People struggling for food, water, medicine, shelter will not in any world spend 10% of their income on internet. Thinking that they will is out of touch with reality and would only be a valid chain of thought when you’ve not seen what real poverty looks like.
Global cellular operator revenue is approx $1T. They have put their toe in the water with direct-to-cellular support for starlink, and have bought spectrum to improve this. I'm sure they basically want to offer cellular to everyone in the world and get a good chunk of that $1T. Maybe they want 20% of it? Sounds crazy, but China Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom each have 10%. Sounds it's not so wild that they can grab a big chunk, especially if they can find new customers that are not already connected.
And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.
I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.
Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.
And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.
With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.
It will take years if not more to be technical capable to have modems so good that they can communicate with a starlink satelite in any reasonable 'day to day' way.
And Starlink already increased prices again.
And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.
Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.
Space Bears have been saying this for quite a while, we live in megalopolis which already are covered very efficiently and we are only becoming more urban. Of course their voice was drowned because rockets are essentially giant penises piercing the atmosphere and hence the intersection of nerds getting excited for the sake of technical prowness and rich guys who don't get laid who seem to be nowadays at the helm of the intelligentia didn't want to hear none of that.
On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.
At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.
All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"
India has one of the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. In fact you can get an extremely fast download atop Himalayan mountains in comparison to remote USA
In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.
You’d be surprised how poor broadband Internet coverage is outside of major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some places are simply off-grid, or have to rely on dial up. All you have to do is drive an hour out and there’s no more Internet.
You are in a dense population. A large chunk of the world (and many people even in the US) are in low density environments where fiber rollouts are too expensive.
You’re not dumb. It has come up in extremely sophisticated valuations of SpaceX pre-IPO, if I recall off the top of my head, the only business that actually had any value, StarLink, assumes an irrational TAM.
I live not to far from NYC and I think it’s fantastic. Comcast was charging me 75 a month and Starlink charges me 40 for the same service which is generally excellent
I am also in rural EU and have 1 house that has fiber, and another, 10 minute drive away has nothing, not even cell signal and it won't get anything any time soon. Starlink is basically the only option.
Starlink is a problem that solves itself. If enough fiber rolls out that there's no more customers, they'll scale back satellites (since they only last 3-5 years).
It's not but it's all so tiresome to explain why. Also, those (hypothetical) towers have no ROI because they only serve poor people. Starlink covers the entire world so parts of the world can subsidize service to other parts.
It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.
I think that while Starlink is a technical innovation its primary benefit is as a political innovation: it lets you sidestep a lot of politics.
Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.
If we can get internet from the sky, it's hard to justify digging up the earth with cables for the same thing.
I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.
Modern installation is direct bury. There are no trenches, no way to run new cables without new directional drilling. In any already built areas, these projects are constantly hitting gas, water, sewer, cable, electric, and other already buried infrastructure. Maybe (probably) it's still cheaper than launching satellites but it can be quite disruptive.
I disagree, maintaining a giant fleet of satellites is almost certainly more expensive in the long run than just running a lot of cable. Not that cable doesn’t need maintenance but Starlink needs to replace every satellite every five years. And they can’t recycle a thing, they just burn up.
You’re presenting a false choice. It isn’t “Starlink or no internet”, it’s “why not other internet options?”
A v2 Starlink satellite costs $800K and on average 25 are launched at once. Launch cost for a reusable Falcon 9 is $15 million. So that's $1.4 million per satellite to orbit lasting 5 years that's $280K / sat / y, or $2.8 billion / y to maintain a constellation of 10,000. And SpaceX is not known for complacency. The unit cost will continue to drop.
On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.
Starlink has 10 MILLION customers. Thats just nothing.
All the investment in Fiber and mobile towers are long lasting investments.
Starlink NEEDS v3 to scale because they already have scaling issues. They need Starship, which doesn't work yet, to work to even send v3 up there.
And while Spacex has some first mover advantage, other companies start doing the same which will eat their margins. Makes it even more complicated to run all of it.
They have to do 300k orbit correction already last year, kessler syndrom can happen which will block access to space for all of us.
We don't even know yet how dangerous the poisoning of our atmosphere will be.
If the entire world used Starlink it would grind to a halt. They’d need to spend exponentially more to have more satellites to provide that necessary bandwidth.
You still need a powerline to your house, sewer and water.
There are plenty of fibers and dark fibers on power pools.
Starlink doesn't 'just' pollute the night sky for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN (8 Billion people) it can also poisen our atmosphere when they re-enter and burn up.
if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.
My parents live in New York State, 8 miles from the main east-west transportation and data corridor. They still have no high speed wired internet options. No fiber, no cable, no DSL, and dialup ISP has been retired long ago. Their only option is satellite. This is in 4th most populous state in the US, and #1 highest GDP/capita. Internet across the United States does not have the penetration many think, the US is vast.
In Europe, even rural areas tend to be fairly close to cities, whereas in North America, lots of farms are really remote. This map from NASA [0] should give you an idea of how remote some areas can be.
Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.
Fiber deployment is bottlenecked by Baumol's Cost Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. There's basically no productivity gains being made in how quickly skilled laborers can deploy fiber. Like everything else involving skilled labor, the price keeps going up.
One place where fiber cables cannot reach would be... way up in the air. Think about how many people fly each day and then remember how poor internet connectivity and speeds are at 40,000 ft.
People who live out in rural areas. Think farmers, or just people who love living out on their own lands, common enough in the US. I have a friend who lives off Starlink internet, it would cost way too much to get internet all the way to his property, not really worth it.
I have a good friend who relies upon Starlink for connectivity for his home in southeastern Ohio (USA).
We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.
So far, Starlink is the win.
(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)
Australian here. We generally have 1st world internet for most towns. The moment you are outside suburbia, speeds are embarrassingly slow. On my own farm, we dont even have power, or city water, and little to no mobile / cellular reception. We are like hundreds of thousands of other people with rural property here. I suspect the same is true in New Zealand, much of South America, Pacific Islands, Indian Ocean Islands, rural Canada, and often times rural USA.
With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).
And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.
Family lives in Rio/Brazil. With the efforts from our government every year that passes, public safety becomes worse and suburban areas get more marginalized, it got to a point where the drug traffickers from my area start cutting the fibers and leaving letters on mailboxes saying that from now on, anyone who wanted internet had to get their illegal internet.
Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family
So the drug traffickers that cut the fiber have no problem with your Starlink dish outside your home, and don't break it and/or threaten you? If they care, that seems like an oversight they will soon correct once enough people start using it.
They clearly don't want to threaten all the people directly for protection money. That limits what they are willing to do for the scheme. So they cut the cable at places where people are not. This is both efficient in employee time as well as in risk. Starlink antennas can be installed on roofs or in places that aren't easily visible.
Also you could install it in things that don't look like it since it only needs an mostly unobstructed view in a cone to the sky. For example I could se an installation in a fake rain barrel, old bathtub inside a stack of firewood. some cloth coverings also would work so it doesn't have to be open either.
The only way to find the actual installations would be survey flights that take pictures and compare the data. Then send out inspectors to see if changes on buildings hide starlink antennas.
I think the only effect will be that the scheme will go away. Alternatively they could just improve their service so it competes on performance and price with starlink.
A brazilian favela is not a representation for a global satelite network which consumes and produces a lot of energy and co2 to be send up and poisens our atmosphere when theybreak down.
There was no evaluation of the obvouse shitty problem in such areas.
And as i said, metal tubes do break radio signals.
the next generation of satellites base stations that are currently going up remove the need for base stations
you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone
but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient
lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road
week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks
I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical
speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription
Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.
In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.
Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.
Here in Alaska it’s literally better than the cable internet (except apparently for gaming but I don’t really game), and $10/mo cheaper for a starlink roam.
At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.
I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available
Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well
Subsidies make anything possible. Your grandkids will be paying for that fibre. Starlink is revolutionary for long last-mile links that will never be economic.
I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.
So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.
So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.
We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.
Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.
It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.
Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.
WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.
I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.
India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).
Starlink has its uses, but I really don't understand those who get starlink while living in built-up areas.
Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.
There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...
For war it is. Drones and other unmanned aircraft are the future of warfare. That's the whole reason why every country now heavily invests in low orbit sats.
It's not about consumers. Also not for spacex. Defence contracts are zillion times more worth. Once you are in you reach the end level as a business.
You are right about drones, but Starlink etc is still used a lot by forward deployments of troops. Afaik it has revolutionised the ability to contact these deployments. But I'm not an army guy
Russia has attempted to jam Starlink satellites but with very limited success. The problem for Russia is that the constellation is enormous and uses highly directional phased-array radios which are naturally resistant to jamming. They can temporarily jam a few birds over a limited area but don't have the resources to effect sustained denial. We might eventually see them escalate to kinetic strikes on the satellites.
I don’t see why it would be different in 100 years. The fibre might be slightly better (hollow core fibre will increase speed from 2/3c to nearly c), but, absent new physics, it’s hard to imagine anything beating _that_.
I remember 10-15 years ago The Gathering, Norways biggest LAN party, had a wifi sponsor, and there were talks about how soon we don't even need wired internet, because wifi is getting so good with wifi 6 and all. Crazy thing to claim about a sports hall with 5000 computers and even more mobile devices.
I can't say we are much closer to that goal now :)
I have a friend who does not live that remote in Australia and his choice is either "satellite" internet or starlink.
It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.
From a purely utilitarian standpoint, direct to cell feels like a good thing to me. Large swathes of Scotland don't even have sufficient mobile connection to send a text message (some people will tell you that's a good thing, but I'm not one of them).
I live in a major Indian city and 1 gig fiber up and down is $30. We've also got really good 4G/5G in most places. Also in the super remote areas WiMAX is (still) an option.
Well, it has proven itself to be a very useful military asset in Ukraine.
The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.
And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.
If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment).
I suppose one real upside is that in very regulated areas with only one operator this gives them some baseline regarding service that they actually need to beat.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.
Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.
There's a market for it, think internet on vacation, on ships, trains, planes, and underdeveloped / remote areas (some of which skipped wired internet entirely and just have 3/4/5G).
But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India
Many in Canada have no broadband options. My gf has this because otherwise, no internet access. Even cellphone reception is spotty where she is in rural Canada.
I think in most markets the advantage SpaceX has is it isn't paying huge fees for Spectrum, the frequencies it owns were very cheap. Eg in the USA I think the providers spent nearly $100 Billion on spectrum where SpaceX can compete without that cost.
It's less about India and more about Usanai where urban sprawl is all the rage which makes wiring it impossible… and capitalist-driven-development doesn't help.
I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.
I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.
I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.
Starlink satellites are intentionally designed to be very dark, but they become more visible when the sun is about to come up or if there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby to reflect off of them.
If there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby that are bright enough to produce a visible reflection off a satellite, you are about to be dead.
Yeah, I meant to point out there that there is a tension between the technology that I don't mind, but the infrastructure for it that I do mind. I don't really know what the answer is. I do know that we're probably not going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.
It’s just that, while so much of the sky is static, it’s impossible to gaze at without your attention being grabbed by the moving flick of light, it takes active effort to ignore it. So it’s a totally different experience stargazing now vs 20 years ago.
I love being off-grid with just my slow inReach Mini 1. I can communicate in case of an emergency, but otherwise it's a great forcing function to not be hyper connected. I worry if I brought the portable Starlink with I'd connect much more than necessary.
> I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.
Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.
Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].
> "SpaceX has told the FCC that the Gen3 network is intended to serve not only consumers and enterprises but also government customers and "billions of AI-powered devices worldwide,"
The Starlink satellites last 5 years and then drop and disintegrate. Don't think a billion AI devices will exist in 5 years! Unless by Ai devices they mean phones.
> "While SpaceX hasn't announced rates for its new Gen3 service, I expect it to be at least $200 a month, and I won't be surprised if it ends up being $300 a month."
Not sure that is affordable for most of the world population.
One cool thing about Starlink is that it can potentially improve latency across the world. In optical fibers the light travels only two thirds as fast due to the index of refraction. But in space you can use a laser to send the data in a straight line in a vacuum.
Um yeah but the transmission path is longer and the equipment and signal processing on each hop also adds latency. I really doubt it'll make much of a difference.
I mean with satellite it's longer. You have to go up and down, and starlink sats prefer sending data streams back to the ground as soon as they can (because the laser interconnect capacity is limited).
And variable, no less due to the high differential speed of the satellites. And the signal conditioning is much more involved than on the ground.
Regarding the going "up and down", Starlink satellites orbit at about 500 km above the Earth's surface compared to the Earth's radius of 6400 km. For longer distances it will still be worthwhile. Right now, you're right that we are limited by satellite laser interconnect capacity though.
I feel like I already have internet access pretty much everywhere with cell towers, and even then if I went to the middle of alaska or montana I could already get sattelite internet before starlink with hugesnet which is fine as long as you're not gaming or something.
But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.
I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.
So, at some point, will our devices connect to their corporate offices in any environment, even without providing access to your network, short of putting it inside a Faraday Cage?
Probably not that many lives, maybe like a handful of hikers every year I would guess? I think what attracts hikers in the first place is the danger, and the idea that they're exploring an area that is "outside of civilization"
Do we really need that? Most of us are fine with relays. The coverage in remote parts could be handled by way fewer sattelites. 100k is a lot of sattelites. Seems that with 100k leo we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?
Just coverage is already provided by the 600-something direct to cell satellites already in orbit yes, but you need more if you want it to be useful beyond loading text-only posts or sending SMS
It also creates a private internet on which “private enterprise” does not have to abide by the Constitution or any subordinate laws.
Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?
It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.
There are already zero private companies that have to follow the constitution, since it never applied to them, ever.
As another person mentioned, radio crosses international boundaries, but it is regulated by regulating ground equipment and people and organizations on the ground. You'll see some countries on https://starlink.com/map that are greyed out because of regulatory issues... for example, some countries such as India heavily control the use of satellite comms
This would allow you to throw a flock camera up literally anywhere on earth. If we are being honest, we are probably only a couple years out from real Orwellian mass surveillance states, totally censored and mined communications, and general purpose compute restricted or made illegal I wouldn't even be surprised. All the incentives lead right to that and we are halfway there in many ways already.
I hate to break it to you, you are already in an "Orwellian mass surveillance state" and just don't realize it, just as the majority of people in the Orwellian mass surveillance state also were not aware of.
Case in point, are you aware that the whole 2+2=5 line was a deliberate falsification of a perfectly sound and even healthy statement that Orwell stole and perverted, i.e., 2 + 2 + the people's enthusiasm = 5 ???
Then, when you start finding out that the CIA, at the same time that it was conducting its MKUltra "experiments", was aggressively buying up all the rights to 1984 and then pushed them into schools and made the movies in close collaboration with Propagandawood; you have to at least start asking yourself extremely uncomfortable questions about whether 1984 was actually a warning or preconditioning, aka grooming.
Do you think Starlink is somehow extraterritorial or something? They're no more or no less a "private internet" than any other ISP. People need to get a reality check. Hacker news is becoming one of the most luddite places on the internet.
The limitations on the current T-Satellite service have a lot to do with the spectrum being shared with terrestrial towers and the low number of satellites.
The new constellation will be physically closer, with much larger antennas and a much larger number of satellites with a much higher capacity per satellite. It will also use dedicated spectrum with no terrestrial interference. Coverage and speed will be improved tremendously.
You’re still limited to the transmission and receive capabilities of mobile devices which already struggle with current cell networks. I’m
Not arguing it won’t be nice for people truly remote, but people keep acting like this will replace cell towers, which it won’t.
Kessler is much less of a problem at their altitude (480km). Debris has too much drag and would get pulled down too quick to have a sustained Kessler situation. It's possible, but very very unlikely at that altitude.
You could still generate a mess for 5-10 years at that altitude. Even if it self-clears you still destroy the constellation and deny access to LEO for years.
starlink satellites are in low orbits and will deorbit in a few years at most if bricked; to stay in orbit, they use ion thrusters to counter drag from the very uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.
Some of the debris from a collision may end up in an orbit with a higher apogee, perigee will necessarily still be at or below the altitude of the last collision and will be subject to some of the same low-orbit aerodynamic drag that starlink satellites experience; passes through lower altitudes will apply drag that will first drop the apogee and will then eventually cause the debris to reenter.
How can it linger in a higher orbit. Maybe some of the debris gets a kick which increases its velocity, but you need two velocity boosts to circularise the orbit, no? So I figure at worst you get an elliptical orbit which will still decay
1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.
2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.
Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.
And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.
I've read the entire series of Culture novels and don't recall seeing "starmind" as a term anywhere. Mind, yes, but used in a somewhat different context, as the minds are both sentient conversational AI entities with equal or greater intellect to a meat-based human or alien, and also semi-godlike AI powers (a single Mind has the capacity to have a 1:1 conversation with all of the residents of an Orbital if it wants to).
Last time I checked, you couldn't get a public IPv4 through Starlink, let alone a fixed one. This makes it a non-starter as a backup link for self-hosters, a use case it is well suited for.
You do get a public IPv6 IP, which is fine for most people (and with a simple script on a cron can keep a AAAA up to date, not that it changes often). And like someone else said, if you insist, you can use something like tailscale to punch a hole in Starlink's global NAT.
Surely it’ll be an issue some day for other space activities with all the SpaceX kit up there? I know space is very large :) but surely it’d be hard to scan, calculate and control trajectories of millions of orbiting tiny things when you’re launching rockets and things? A spacex satellite almost crashed into the Chinese space station some years ago and the Chinese had to perform an evasive manoeuvre I believe
Satellites flying at 360km (the target altitude for starlink V3) deorbit very quickly without regular burns. Dead starlink satellites are guaranteed to come down within 5 years.
With modern automation and AI, tracking and adjusting paths is better every year. Also, anything with malfunctioning movement will quickly descend and burn up in the atmosphere at that very low orbit.
Yes and I'll become another space industry. Cleanup. Sort of like how (coal/ocean/etc) pollution is both a problem and multi billion dollar a year industry.
Starlink is going to become a phone carrier that doesn’t have to pay for pole or tower access. This is the real story, so long att, verizon, and T-Mobile. Starlink is going to beat them on price and availability. Just think, no international calling fees or hassle and cheaper mobile rates.
I think the end game is convenience. Nobody really needs anything more than 200mb/s. If the average person can have their entire family stream their favorite Netflix show at the same time then that’s good enough. “Now lil Jimmy can watch it in the minivan too!”
Uploading large files is probably the biggest thing, 4k video streaming (out) while others in my house are streaming in or playing games with no slowdown.
I remember watching hours pass uploading files on my 200 mbit. Still take time but much faster with gigabit (measured at 940 bmit, so not the full 1gbit)
It's sort of amazing that people still say these sorts of things today.
I don't think it's at all inconceivable where people in the future are streaming high resolution multi modal personal sensor arrays to AI that is running in a data center...and ditto we are streaming ever more content back.
That's just the in vogue answer of 2026. There are undoubtedly endless innovations that I can't envision that will require ever more resources.
My point is just that every single "X ought to be good enough" has been proven false. And the only times where we see consumption really plateau are due to other reasons than desire (like cost).
I doubt you are the average consumer though. Now days I think the biggest average consumer use case is streaming and game downloading, with game downloading being the biggest “I want it now!” impulse. But do you need 1gb service to download that call of duty game every year? I even think most people could get by with 50mb/s and not even know as long as the latency keeps up. If it’s fast enough to stream Bluey the masses are content.
Sucks for regular astronomy then, where long exposures are the norm.
Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.
I'm not confident after all government investigations and lawsuits against Elon and his companies were dropped when Elon illegally accessed government systems, illegally took government data, illegally terminated government employees, and illegally eliminated government departments and programs while creating billions in expenses while pretending his intention was to help anyone but himself.
"It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive," said Tingay. "We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research that are currently underway."
Sounds like not transmitting but just electronics existing in space.
Starlink is leaking into radio astronomy bands, they initially said there wouldn't be a problem, but there was. They've later stated it would addressed in Gen-2 - it got worse.
> Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong.
Might be time to make global regulations on spectrum usage in space? That could take a while.
There are many past examples of companies "not violating current regulations" despite leaking toxins and other now recognised violations of the commons.
> Starlink is leaking into radio astronomy bands, they initially said there wouldn't be a problem, but there was.
Again, these are two different things and conflating them is not productive. The initial discussion with Starlink and the astronomy community that I followed closely was explicitly about conflicts on the service frequencies (i.e. the thing unique to Starlink). They were cooperative with that.
Now it turns out electronics in space emit EM noise and that is the thing showing up in astronomy and it has nothing to do with the RF internet side. Non-Starlink satellites emit it as well but the sheer volume of starlink sats makes it easier to detect theirs.
The distinction matters because the same thing will happen with any constellation regardless of its purpose if it has onboard computers, batteries, solar arrays, etc.
I’m for passing regulations on this emissivity, but the framing that this is some kind of rug pull by spacex is dumb. They could have participated in the community the legally required amount like the Chinese do and we’d be in a much worse position.
Sucks being out bush stargazing and then seeing a massive constellation to remind you of Musk's wealth and influence. It's no longer possible to totally escape visual reminders of civilisation
They don't stop you from seeing the stars, but I find them very distracting. Makes the experience of looking up at the stars on a quiet night less peaceful, I find.
I may have blown the math, but the last time I calculated I figured there were about 35 Starlink satellites above the horizon at my latitude. Looking into the suburban early night sky I see zero, one, or two satellites with about equal probability.
I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.
So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.
30 yard wide solar array from 300 miles away. There's a brief period of the day where they're visible but hardly a risk of making a dent in your view of the sky especially compared to ordinary terrestrial light pollution.
I'm in a heavily light polluted city (Phoenix) and even with all the air and light pollution, can still see satellites every moment past 2AM to the east. At least this time of year.
It will be the first generation with widespread space travel. My children will have consumer access to a view that no one had seen until 1960 something and only government employees had seen since.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadinvestors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital.
sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!
In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.
Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.
Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...
Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...
Although even if we grant you your assumption about 99.9%, doesn't this show that you can still have a business if that is true? 12 million customers is a sustainable business.
make them pre-pay a multi-trillion cleanup and cancer fund for all the toxic waste, not just the launches but pollution burning up in the atmosphere
* https://satellitemap.space/
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.
In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Unrealistic, I know, but one can dream.
It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.
(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).
While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.
https://www.spacex.com/starshield
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.
To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.
And why does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
…which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.
India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.
They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.
I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.
Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
AI data centers in space, of course!
That is very valuable.
The payload we send to space is very limited and the 300% increase in the few last years was ONLY starlink itself.
Thats the issue Musk has to sell it to the investors and his idea is datacenter payload.
Just that he would need to send 300 Starships up there to even install a smallish datacenter like his own colossus 1.
Starship is not done yet, we have not seen it fly up there and return for 300 times at all.
Sad to see this place becoming a normal web forum.
Is your position that _you_ can make assertions without evidence but that lesser mortals may not contradict you without writing a paper on the subject?
I’m convinced that a large part of the user base of this site is genuinely, literally, solipsistic.
According to an AI I asked, about 50% of that value is Starlink, with space launches and AI making up about 25% each.
The Starlink business depends on their cheap space launch tech, so using these rough numbers capability I'd say it is worth 75% of the company, or $1400B.
And i brought an argument. You said it makes space-x very valuable and i explain that the amount of payload we even send up is very limited which contracditcs 'very valuable'.
I then explain further what Elon Musks plan is to sell us his trillion dollar company or how you frame it 'very valuable' and explain why it doesn't work
I think that qualifies as "very valuable" in any context.
The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.
I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.
With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.
There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.
In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
it is well known that Australia has an extremely lazy workforce that refuse to put in any real work.
the best example here is the stupid residential building cost. nowadays it costs over $1m AUD or $700k USD do a first floor 2bedroom 1 bathroom extension for an existing house in good condition. That is significantly more expensive than building a big house in the US.
let's don't even start on the quality of those new builds, that would be the laughing stock of the entire world.
So not a problem
(Only being snarky, obviously as a consumer it's great to have an option like this)
India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.
There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.
Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.
Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.
At what ever unit economic price... That is not exactly massive market globally.
The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.
And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.
Awesome!
However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizen's data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.
The EU is
No, I disagree. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when the GMaps labelled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was bunk. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.
In which case, yes, SpaceX can also spin up new makeshift ground stations using off the shelf user terminals.
The current ground stations use specialized transceivers, but that's an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental limitation.
> I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable.
There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.
It's not impossible that you truly are, but it is unlikely.
Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.
Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.
So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.
Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.
Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.
Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.
Even starlink only makes sense if you ignore the absolutely immense capital investment in it. And they're probably hiding losses in the launch division considering it's losing money despite 80% of its business being launching starlink satellites (they blame starship but that was supposed to be funded by NASA).
So is the nuclear reactor business but at least with that you gain independence from Iran whereas the satellite dog business gives you independence from the tyrant T-mobile or Verizon...
It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.
The mobile applications, particularly in the case of airline aircraft, have also been compelling and worth a lot of money to SpaceX.
Starlink has also brought broadband Internet to a vast number of people that would not have had it otherwise. This will boost the worldwide economy by an enormous amount.
One might say brainwashed…
Turns out a simple water cooler technology is enough. We are all back to office because of efficiency.
Starlink brought internet to a lot of people who had it before already but made it easier for them.
Its still quite a interesting technology, given, but for the fact that he destroys potentially our atmosphere, has control over war critical tech, can do survailance and wants to send out A Lot MORE into our space, its a net negative for at least 7-8 BILLION people while 10 Millionen people benefit from it.
And they even increased the price just a few weeks back...
I think there’s easily potential for a billion subscribers eventually.
I’m not joking.
There’s billions of dollars in monitoring and maintaining remote sites / handling remote connectivity, doing bespoke SaaS tools, etc. Like, literally high hundreds of millions or low billions.
To the extent that they're not actually wrong about that TAM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market#/medi...
Note that I am not claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.
I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
Here's the result of Russia's efforts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpX5mqeK5PI
If you are churning plans anyway, and that's the speed you want, you should have starlink in the mix.
I fully expect the NBN wholesale to keep getting more expensive, while I expect satellite providers to get cheaper.
Regarding latency, starlink satellites are low enough that it just isn't an issue.
He was a line tech and was fully aware that my slowness wasn't related to the line, and as he replaced all the lines to my house he enthusiastically recommended that I report the company to the FTC and demand a refund for the service degradation which wasn't meeting their advertised speeds. He actually gave me great advice for getting my case escalated and I was refunded for several months on my service.
They eventually got the node upgraded (I was once struggling to get 60Mbps down on the same line I'm getting >1G on today), and they're upgrading everything to DOCSIS 4.0 currently. I'm not trying to sell you on them, just saying they'll likely work their problems out in the long run. Fundamentally, coax line connection's floor is Starlink's ceiling as long as the nodes are able to keep up.
India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network
In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...
See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026
The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).
Salt water, is nasty, it gets everywhere, the environment on boats is damp. Ships are complicated and require constant effort to keep running.
Any sort of "automation" you build in is subject to those same environmental conditions, and wont last long.
Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots
The same bosses will pay multiple security guards, in addition to staff, to guard <$10m in goods at a Walmart. But when 50x the goods are in the ocean, suddenly the staff is the limiter?
Now the crew will be very pleased if they get a Starlink connection rather than the ridiculously small crew connectivity allowance Inmarsat et al will give them, but that all depends on shipping companies not having to pay premium prices for maritime connectivity.
It's been broken/unavailable on maybe 6 of my flights out of hundreds.
And this is all before they launch a phone or something and wipe out global telecoms in one stroke, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative which are both completely plausible and lucrative.
And we must remember that 6G is in the final stages of development, which has peak speeds of 1 Tbps.
This is not a problem in Africa and India.
https://www.google.de/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.2745409,...
In most of the world, if a some leaves are in the way, it's quite simple to remove the leaves.
EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/29/spacex-secret-laun...
It's billed at cost. Not at price.
For launches of our Starlink satellites, the Company does not recognize any inter-segment revenue, rather those launch costs are capitalized in satellites in Property, plant, and equipment, net. We allocate a significant amount of launch capacity to our Connectivity segment, and expect to allocate a significant amount to our AI segment in the future. Our Space segment revenue only reflects our customer launches and customer activities.
For launches dedicated to deploying our Starlink satellites, we capitalize the associated costs within our Connectivity segment and depreciate them over time, and we do not recognize revenue for those launches in our Space segment.
The launch cost for Starlink is in the connectivity segment. It has to go somewhere on your balance sheet and you can't magic it away.
If you manufacture cement and you also sell premixed concrete in another division it's a similar thing. Or any other company that sells both raw material and finished product.
Here they are saying it's in the connectivity segment costs instead of them buying it at retail. That's all there is.
That's how analysts can estimate launch costs ~$20MM and $600k for satellites as opposed to the idea that launch is $0 for Starlink and the cost is hidden in the space segment.
They need Starship to be able to send v3 up, without v3 it doesn't scale well enough.
Starship still hasn't proven it can actually bring up the relevant payload high enough and they need it to be reusable otherwise costs will increase.
And they already exist and only have 10 Million customers. They need to get countries on their side like India but these countries are not stupid. Elon Musk showed them very clearly what he can do like his statements he did when Ukraine war started.
My informed opinion says that you are wildly wrong.
(Also don’t forget the Starlink related military contracts that SpaceX has.)
Starlink increased prices just a fwe weeks ago.
So whats stoping the future starlink explosion?
People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.
I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.
BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year.
Lack of sufficient population density and political instability is what would stop this.
I explicitly mentioned income per person. This is household income, which obviously will be higher than individual income.
People vastly underestimate the subjective importance of the Internet for people. 10-20% of the total income seems like a very realistic figure, even if it means spending some days hungry.
And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.
I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.
Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.
And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.
With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.
I don't see a reason why countries with existing carriers would allow that, given the owner's stance about political meddling.
And Starlink already increased prices again.
And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.
Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.
Phone > Satellite connection cannot happen indoors directly, whereas 3-4-5g can, today, not 10 years and billions of R&D into the future
On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.
At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.
All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"
Or in cities where fiber gets blocked by cable providers bribing corrupt local officials.
Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.
I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.
You’re presenting a false choice. It isn’t “Starlink or no internet”, it’s “why not other internet options?”
On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.
All the investment in Fiber and mobile towers are long lasting investments.
Starlink NEEDS v3 to scale because they already have scaling issues. They need Starship, which doesn't work yet, to work to even send v3 up there.
And while Spacex has some first mover advantage, other companies start doing the same which will eat their margins. Makes it even more complicated to run all of it.
They have to do 300k orbit correction already last year, kessler syndrom can happen which will block access to space for all of us.
We don't even know yet how dangerous the poisoning of our atmosphere will be.
If the entire world used Starlink it would grind to a halt. They’d need to spend exponentially more to have more satellites to provide that necessary bandwidth.
You still need a powerline to your house, sewer and water.
There are plenty of fibers and dark fibers on power pools.
Starlink doesn't 'just' pollute the night sky for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN (8 Billion people) it can also poisen our atmosphere when they re-enter and burn up.
if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.
Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.
[0]: https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/i...
(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)
So Starlink in flights seems like a perfect fit.
We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.
So far, Starlink is the win.
(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)
With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).
And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.
Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family
Also you could install it in things that don't look like it since it only needs an mostly unobstructed view in a cone to the sky. For example I could se an installation in a fake rain barrel, old bathtub inside a stack of firewood. some cloth coverings also would work so it doesn't have to be open either.
The only way to find the actual installations would be survey flights that take pictures and compare the data. Then send out inspectors to see if changes on buildings hide starlink antennas.
I think the only effect will be that the scheme will go away. Alternatively they could just improve their service so it competes on performance and price with starlink.
Finding it would be very easy as these houses are not huge houses, enter the house, snip the cables.
Besides that, its all hypotetical. Just because in some random shitty neigherhood this issue exists, doesn't mean anything anyway.
Very fitting.
A brazilian favela is not a representation for a global satelite network which consumes and produces a lot of energy and co2 to be send up and poisens our atmosphere when theybreak down.
There was no evaluation of the obvouse shitty problem in such areas.
And as i said, metal tubes do break radio signals.
Starlink still produces a lot of co2 and they can poisen our atmopshere when burning up.
you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone
but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient
lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road
week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks
I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical
speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription
bigger satellites will bring that to everyone
In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.
Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.
At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.
I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available
Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well
So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.
So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.
We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.
Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.
Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know
Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.
WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.
I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.
But then again, I never thought WiFi would take over wired network cables, but now even my desktop is connected with WiFi.
I also didn’t think cellular would be a replacement for copper or fiber, but now my modem for the apartment is 5G.
Both ended up being good enough, easier and cheaper (!)
Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.
There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...
Maybe neutrino comms for long distance? :)
I can't say we are much closer to that goal now :)
It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.
The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.
And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.
If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment).
Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.
Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.
You just said it yourself:
> Then, only months later, but after years of planning:
Starlink is no replacement for fiber, but even all across the EU and the US there are many places without fiber access.
But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.
Many in Canada have no broadband options. My gf has this because otherwise, no internet access. Even cellphone reception is spotty where she is in rural Canada.
And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.
I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.
First scalable launch system and scaled LEO constellation are more than promises.
You can certainly have a problem with Elon Musk, but the people who have invested money with him over the years have done quite well for themselves.
I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.
I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.
i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?
Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.
Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].
[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...
The Starlink satellites last 5 years and then drop and disintegrate. Don't think a billion AI devices will exist in 5 years! Unless by Ai devices they mean phones.
> "While SpaceX hasn't announced rates for its new Gen3 service, I expect it to be at least $200 a month, and I won't be surprised if it ends up being $300 a month."
Not sure that is affordable for most of the world population.
And variable, no less due to the high differential speed of the satellites. And the signal conditioning is much more involved than on the ground.
But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.
I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.
Your experience doesn't match most of the world.
Must be the most unsustainable way to provide internet
My provider took 3 years from the signing for fibre to the actual delivery. But I still had internet before. Worse but internet.
If SpaceX stops, internet is pretty quickly gone.
And it seems SpaceX is its own best customer when they need to put up and replace so many satellites.
Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?
It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.
As another person mentioned, radio crosses international boundaries, but it is regulated by regulating ground equipment and people and organizations on the ground. You'll see some countries on https://starlink.com/map that are greyed out because of regulatory issues... for example, some countries such as India heavily control the use of satellite comms
Case in point, are you aware that the whole 2+2=5 line was a deliberate falsification of a perfectly sound and even healthy statement that Orwell stole and perverted, i.e., 2 + 2 + the people's enthusiasm = 5 ???
Then, when you start finding out that the CIA, at the same time that it was conducting its MKUltra "experiments", was aggressively buying up all the rights to 1984 and then pushed them into schools and made the movies in close collaboration with Propagandawood; you have to at least start asking yourself extremely uncomfortable questions about whether 1984 was actually a warning or preconditioning, aka grooming.
The new constellation will be physically closer, with much larger antennas and a much larger number of satellites with a much higher capacity per satellite. It will also use dedicated spectrum with no terrestrial interference. Coverage and speed will be improved tremendously.
The more you know.
I wonder what spacex will be worth when launching satellites is impossible for a couple hundred years.
starlink satellites are in low orbits and will deorbit in a few years at most if bricked; to stay in orbit, they use ion thrusters to counter drag from the very uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.
https://ai-solutions.com/newsroom/why-starlink-is-lowering-s...
Orbits are about speed. Two things colliding cannot have debris coming out at a faster velocity than either of them.
1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.
2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.
Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.
And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.
Elon really needs to drop some cash on Iain Bank’s family, if he’s going to keep stealing ideas/names for his empire.
I remember watching hours pass uploading files on my 200 mbit. Still take time but much faster with gigabit (measured at 940 bmit, so not the full 1gbit)
I don't think it's at all inconceivable where people in the future are streaming high resolution multi modal personal sensor arrays to AI that is running in a data center...and ditto we are streaming ever more content back.
That's just the in vogue answer of 2026. There are undoubtedly endless innovations that I can't envision that will require ever more resources.
My point is just that every single "X ought to be good enough" has been proven false. And the only times where we see consumption really plateau are due to other reasons than desire (like cost).
This is necessarily a question that requires thought and speculation about the future.
You can't just flip a switch and do it overnight if it turns out there is demand.
And if there isn't demand, you are going to lose a lot of money.
Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.
But sure, the FCC might take it seriously.
~ https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...
and several other papers over the past half decade.
It's old news that they leak, and old news that F-all gets done about it.
Back to you.
Sounds like not transmitting but just electronics existing in space.
> Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong.
Might be time to make global regulations on spectrum usage in space? That could take a while.
There are many past examples of companies "not violating current regulations" despite leaking toxins and other now recognised violations of the commons.
Again, these are two different things and conflating them is not productive. The initial discussion with Starlink and the astronomy community that I followed closely was explicitly about conflicts on the service frequencies (i.e. the thing unique to Starlink). They were cooperative with that.
Now it turns out electronics in space emit EM noise and that is the thing showing up in astronomy and it has nothing to do with the RF internet side. Non-Starlink satellites emit it as well but the sheer volume of starlink sats makes it easier to detect theirs.
The distinction matters because the same thing will happen with any constellation regardless of its purpose if it has onboard computers, batteries, solar arrays, etc.
I’m for passing regulations on this emissivity, but the framing that this is some kind of rug pull by spacex is dumb. They could have participated in the community the legally required amount like the Chinese do and we’d be in a much worse position.
Yes they do talk about working to avoid causing interference.
That's been ongoing since before the first Starlink went up and has been ongoing as later generations haven't improved.
The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.
I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.
So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare
Evenly spaced, every 20-30 seconds. Very, very bright at peak reflectivity, with easing in / out. I have no idea what kind of satellite it is though.