Good for them. Bringing production costs from $3000 per terminal in 2020(?) to $1300 in early 2021 to less than $600 now is quite the achievement, and not subsidizing terminals will make rapid expansion a lot cheaper.
Honest question: rapid expansion to where exactly? Are you thinking poorer, rural countries? E.g., with cheaper terminals Starlink will more aggressively sell to rural Brazil, Mexico, India, etc? If they can sell the terminal at cost, how low can they price the monthly service for these poorer countries to fill up unused capacity?
I live in the LA-metro area, 15min away from downtown LA This is a pretty dense urban area, and we can only get Spectrum, which goes down at least once a month for hours at a time, in the middle of the day
The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks
Had a similar issue when living in SF
Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small cities, only have one (crappy) vendor
I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there’s definitely a market for them in well established, densely populated areas in rich countries
The reason they specified sparsely populated areas is that Starlink is designed for sparsely populated areas. In a denser area the performance would drop drastically because you'd need far higher satellite density to sufficiently distribute the load.
That may be true with current space vehicles, but there’s no fundamental reason that two or more SVs can’t form a distributed phased array (for MIMO a la WiFi). At least from a physics / spectrum perspective. The engineering might be tricky.
With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
I imagine the total cost of installation and ongoing maintenance of all the infrastructure required for this proposed setup for a substantial amount of urban users dwarfs the equivalent total cost of just installing new cabling and the lobbying required to get that done, especially over a 20 year period.
The distributed array will however share one link and satellites don't have unlimited capacity either.
Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
I've never heard anyone complain about filling the stratosphere with metal oxides, do you have somewhere I can read more about this risk? Naively, I would have expected that even thousands of 250kg satellites would be insignificant on the scale of the whole stratosphere (we're not talking about surface-level CO2, where we're pumping out gigatons per year), but I have no idea what that ecosystem is like. Is the metal oxide concentration measurable?
I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo.
I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
"Space junk," was a boogie man the news threw at the wall and didn't quite stick. Many of the pictures/diagrams of the satellites made them appear about 1000x bigger than they actually are.
I agree with the sentiment about media sensationalism but I don't think "space junk" is an issue we should be so quick to dismiss.
Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up).
With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
Everything we launch has to pass through these low altitudes. If these altitudes become full of debris we might have to stop all launches for several years [1] and no human presence at space for a bit longer. Quite scary, better to handwave it away "aint happen space is big".
If they can get the interconnect working that issue goes away (its mostly groundstation bandwidth limiting things).
The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic.
It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.
It’s actually not the satellites as the bottleneck typically from what I understand, it’s the ground stations that serve those areas getting too congested.
The satellites may not currently be the bottleneck for certain areas, but they definitely don't support anything resembling a densely or even sparsely populated area.
Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas.
If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined".
Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km.
If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there.
He's the driving force behind some of the greatest innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt many people can say they've had greater impact or could withstand the same scrutiny.
People would have a much better opinion of him if he stuck to realising crazy projects (an electric car thats faster than a supercar, reusable rockets, solar panels that look like normal roof tiles...) and kept his questionable political opinions to himself.
Everyone is free to have their political opinions.
The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g. taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to drive engagement.
i'm not sure what is the source of that but I've noticed that a lot of people has the need to take everything personally, and can't separate things.
for example I really like tom cruise as an actor, one of my personal top 10, but I don't like what he is doing in his private life (the cult thing). so what i'm doing is separating things and take what I like, and ignore (to some extent) what I don't like.
I feel like you guys take things way to serious, and expect everything to be perfect, which is not possible.
Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to repeatedly commit securities fraud.
Adding "I'm not fan of Musk" is odd here. Is this some kind of tribal signal? It's like writing about the market for new AWS services, preceded by "I'm no fan of Bezos but..."
I could be wrong, but I would bet you'll start to see alternatives available to you within the next year / 24 months. There's so much federal money flowing into fiber right now...
Civics and industry co-exist in a healthy society. Musk has consistently demonstrated that he has no civic sense and, when injured, will randomly lash out at whoever the hecklers around him tell him to lash out at.
That's not a quality that's worth celebrating, regardless of how much innovation he might enable. We can and should expect better of people, especially extraordinarily wealthy and powerful ones.
What about the civic sense of proving that great electric cars can be made at a profit, space launch costs can be cut 90%, and Starlink can enable communications by people who live under oppression?
Doesn't actually doing things that matter to the human race matter far more than saying comforting words and avoiding giving offense?
I don't think any of these things imply civic sense. At best, it shows a man with decent business acumen. At worst, he's an opportunist and a reactionary who has substantially degraded the level of political and social discourse of the country he lives in.
Of the things you've highlighted, Starlink has perhaps the strongest case for being evidence of civic sense. But that case is a potential one; in practice, Starlink (and Musk's vision) has yet to impress[1][2].
> I don't think any of these things imply civic sense.
I recommend a biography of Musk.
He makes his electric car patents freely available, to advance the transition to electric cars. He started SpaceX with the purpose of making humans a multi-planetary species. He's repeatedly bet his entire fortune on these goals.
He's civic minded where it counts. And he's delivered results.
As for business acumen, he takes financial risks any other businessman would consider to be insane.
His accomplishments are enormous - showing how to make electric cars at a profit, and cutting the cost of space launches by 90%. And now Starlink, too.
Standing up for free speech includes standing up for the right to express ideas you don't like. I'm sure he'll allow you to post your opinions, too.
Suppressing free speech is the first step towards tyranny.
Just be mindful that the US is the only country that has this attitude towards free speech.
Everyone else including Western countries like UK, Australia, Canada etc have a different take. Which is that hate speech is not conducive to a healthy society and that it doesn't lead to tyranny. Whatever that even means in modern discourse.
They’re rapidly launching more and more capacity. The new v2 mini satellites are more than twice as big as the v1.5 satellites, which themselves are not yet totally in service.
And as they improve the cost of terminals, there’s no fundamental limit in the amount of capacity for a given frequency allocation. Geometric multiplexing is only limited by the number and cost of the phased array elements.
So rapid expansion everywhere.
And then launching the full sized v2 Starlink satellites on Starship will account for another ~2-2.5x increase in size compared to the v2 minis. Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled.
So they have about a factor of 100 capacity expansion in the pipeline, and they can increase the satellite size even further due to Starship’s low costs. They can expand a lot, even in existing countries. Lots of people are on waiting lists due to capacity being filled up in many regions.
> Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled.
SpaceX has launched just under 5,100 Starlink satellites to orbit, of which a single digit percentage have either been deorbited for testing, failure, solar storm knocking them out, etc. Their current constellation total size is approved to be around 12,000 satellites. They've been working to get additional approvals up to 42,000 satellites.
Phased arrays aren't magic. The sharpness of the aperture depends on the physical extent of the antenna and very sharp mainlobes come with additional sidelobes.
There's an additional consideration regarding the price, that poor places can probably share one terminal among one or more villages, thus distributing the cost.
Another possibility is distributing costs by using Starlink as backhaul. India for example already has very cheap high speed mobile data, so a telecom company could spread out the costs of terminals and service (maybe even get a better deal for bulk usage) while simplifying and strengthening their own infrastructure for remote or disaster-prone areas.
Plus, for SpaceX, any point where a satellite is inactive is money left on the table, so they should have significant price flexibility for places which can't afford the current service fees but can afford something that is more than the cost of bandwidth at the downlink station.
Poorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet as 2021.
Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can afford to advertise way more than before. If they can pick up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever that's worth).
My dad's (now brother's) house a few minutes outside a decently-sized town by Downeast Maine standards had a barely 1Mbps down "broadband" link and it was the last house on the road that could even get that. With Starlink, it's actually viable to work from there in addition to streaming video etc. Of course, he wouldn't pay literally any amount but he'd probably pay a lot; I would.
Yeah, I suspect they could have gotten my brother to pay the old full cost plus extra. Still, many people in rural areas aren't willing/able to drop $1k on Internet setup, so keeping costs down is worth more than gouging a few remote software engineers.
Certainly. I'm sure there's a correlation between poor wired broadband and lower income even if it's not perfect. But Starlink is a game changer for a lot of people who otherwise can't get decent wired Internet--and, especially if you can't get wired broadband, the options are mostly pretty bad. Probably changing some with 5G but still not ideal for many people.
Sattelite communication is generally more expensive than cable or cell towers. Though about 70% of the earth is unsuitable for these solutions. Alot of commercial boats are still on very low bandwith connections but could potentially benefit from higher bandwidth if only to make video calls or netflix more available for a similar or higher price. Then there are alot of smaller, private, boats that would benefit from sattelite communication if costs werent prohibitive.
Large swaths of the US have bunk internet like Earthlink. My rural family in Appalachia already like Musk. I think they'd love to have Starlink if it was a little more affordable.
We live in a very rural area. The one time the federal government really came through for me was fiber development grants a few years ago.
We went from Wild Blue internet, which was garbage all around, for $120/mo to a full gig fiber connection locked in at $80/mo for life. It cost us $200 to hook it up.
More and more rural isp's are getting into fiber with grants.
Wow. When I was a kid, we would steal "ELN" accounts for dial-up and then hop on to AOL via TCP/IP.
Edit: we did that so when we got punted we didn't have to go throigh the whole dial-up sequence. Which happened a lot in those days if you were twelve years old.
I'm always kind of puzzled by this question. There are like 7-8 billion humans. Millions of ships, planes, farm machines and other equipment.
Expansion will happen in all direction at the same time, in all market. In very poor country a single village might share one antenna. All the way to very expensive antennas for military aircraft.
I'd buy service to put it on my rooftop to both put economic pressure on the local ISP duopoly in the form of an unambiguous publicly visible third alternative and, also, as a backup.
This is part of why I bought a Starlink dish and put it on the roof of the house I'm doing a full rehab on before the siding was installed. It will give me dual homed internet for when the crap local ISP has issues and a hedge against a single ISP with spotty service.
Ironically, in doing this, I have managed to meet and convince a project manager of a new ISP to add our neighborhood to the list to places to pull fiber to, but it will likely be about a year out.
I know of a couple places that are using starlink as failover because they're only serviced by a single ISP. Makes sense really, and cheaper than 4/5g failover.
I'm also not sure the financial aspect is going to work. There's not many developed countries without proper fiber rollout and very poor countries likely can't support the high infrastructure cost. You're left after that with marginal use cases (boat, remote places...) which won't be enough either.
There's a reason why the comments are mentioning rural US, because it's a clear outlier among the developped world.
The developing world is typically unequal, not universally poor. There are a lot of people in Africa and South America who would get drastically improved internet with Starlink, and can actually afford it.
I'm sure you can find such places, is there enough of them to fund the service which is very expensive? That I'm not so sure.
When people are richer, they also tend to live in countries where the internet access is very important to the state and where installing good internet is an important public policy.
Of course you have exceptions to that general case but I'm not convinced those exceptions are enough by themselves.
They are in a very different market than a traditional product, they are basically servicing the people that nobody else want to service and the distribution of revenue in that group is going to be drastically different from the norm.
The sattelites give coverage everywhere except polar regions at no extra cost. Africa has 1.4 billion people. South America another 400 million. Even if only the top 2% are your target market that's still roughly the same as the entire rural US.
For my parents it’s replaced their cable internet which was slower and less reliable. I wish I could get it where I live in a city apartment. The internet is usually fast, but not reliable.
The only way to have satellite in an tall apartment building is to put it on the roof, which is complicated.
Apple is offering satellite phone service. Starlink shown it's important in the Ukraine-Russia war. There is Starshield for the government uses. Whatever shortcoming of current telecommunication, Starlink can supplement it.
StarShield came out of that though, which might be a legitimate compromise. e.g. governments purchase StarShield and then just do whatever they want with the constellation.
I don't disagree with your sentiments here. But if you've got a service and it's being used for war (regardless of whose side you're on or how patriotic you are), it's not abusive (from my perspective) to just opt out providing service. If Musk is completely a pacifist, which I doubt but let's go with it, then StarShield might end up being a reasonable compromise.
That turned out to be yet another instance of CNN lying about/acting on insufficient/poor information and has since been walked back by the very person that made the original allegation. Confusingly in direct contradiction with supposed excerpts from his book.
Isn't even the first time they falsely alleged that SpaceX shut down Starlink to cause Ukraine trouble and failed to follow up with a correction as loudly as they made the original claims.
Near term naval and aircraft.
Regarding rural third world: the thing about a satellite is it is basically going around in a circle. If the business plan was built around being profitable over the first world then everywhere not over the first world is basically free because you have to build whatever bandwidth you want to provide the first world around the entire orbital ring.
Starlink is not yet ubiquitous even in western countries (EU, UK, US, Can, ...). I believe the rapid expansion meant becoming more ubiquitous in western countries and commercial operations (shipnav, etc).
They have a long, long way to go before even talking about developing countries which already are densely populated and mostly have fast, cheap internet already.
If they get 10 million subscribers at $120 per month, that's $14.4 billion per year which is way more than the cost of the network. And they can easily get 10 million in just the US and Canada. So they can price new subscribers in poorer countries at whatever price they need because the marginal cost to add to the network is near zero.
