It's possible to be "dark" in the visible spectrum and radiate in IR (with probably reduced over all cooling efficiency), but that only solves visible spectrum problems, and I'm not sure whether there are more visible spectrum or IR astronomy ... plus even if you perfectly solved that, someone would be complaining about occlusion anyways.
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dwolvin
Member
Of course it would be a disaster- Starlink won't be providing millions of those sweet, sweet lobbyist dollars. It's interesting how often you can see the simple greed.
ElectricCorn
Member
I know this has been posted elsewhere in this thread but I still think it’s strange that they never show us the payload deploy. It always conveniently cuts off right before it happens and then the feed is restored as the starlinks drift away. It must be something SpaceX doesn’t want their competitors to copy.
The tension rod release process is proprietary. Supposedly SpaceX doesn't want to show how this happens.
Depends on launch cadence, but we're about half way there. 3-6 months?
Musk says Starlink “economically viable” with around 1,000 satellites - SpaceNews.com
Best guess is they'll be swept up by Softbank or possibly even Airbus. They're so far along that somebody is going to keep it going, ostensibly at pennies on the dollar. They currently have ~10% of the constellation's satellites on orbit, thanks to a launch 3 days ago, and they need ~300 for salable service so that's 7-8 more Soyuz launches. Finances notwithstanding that's pretty achievable this year. They're all polar orbits so that's great news for high latitudes, and their user terminal seems pretty far along as well. Not totally sure not their ground station status but that's something that can be rolled out over time as landing rights in different countries are achieved.
Deja Vu. Back in the days of Dysprosium... err... Iridium, Qualcomm was working on GlobalStar, which was a much cheaper alternative. All the market research said that there wasn't enough market for two such companies, and Qualcomm agreed, but was betting that Iridium would go bankrupt due to their much higher cost. Then at the start of the Iraq war, Iridium got bailed out by the US Govt, and Globalstar went bankrupt instead. Oh, well. I wonder how much OneWeb will get?
FCC details on the user terminal https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=1645562
I don't see anything about user terminals in that document. Perhaps you linked the wrong document.
Seems like Softbank is a bit of a *sugar* show these days too and, among other things, aren't really interested in and/or don't have the ability to save OneWeb. OneWeb has basically laid off everyone and is looking to sell-off assets. While the satellite hardware itself isn't the amazing-est, its definitely solid architecture that someone can hopefully pick up on the cheap. As is often the case, the spectrum is probably one of the most valuable pice of the pie, so it will be telling to see who makes a play. The spectrum was basically Wyler's tentpole when he was raising capital, and if my foggy memory serves me right his spectrum goes back to the Google+Elon days.
Somewhat on-topic, while he's certainly a bit biased (Choi is from ABS, one of the third-tier GEO operators, AND has a new company to do satellite internet from GEO with a bunch of small digital sats: https://www.airspaceix.com), this is a no-nonsense perspective on LEO internet.
Tom Choi: OneWeb's Failure Will Dent New Space Investment - Via Satellite -
The Starlink response to that perspective remains to be seen. Certainly Starlink's progress to date is due to Elon's don't-give-a-damn approach to cashflow, but that can't last forever (can it?). The history of satellite internet is that many of the infrastructurally underserved can't afford the service anyway, and given recent clarifications on the extent/capability of Starlink its going to be an uphill battle for SpaceX to significantly change that history. And by 'significantly' I mean deploying and operating a service that is not just profitable, but profitable enough to also 'pay for Mars'.
I think most telling will be whether or not SpaceX adheres to the "we're not competing with terrestrial telcos" clarification from a few weeks ago.
I think Elon cash a lot about cost. Hence the purge in Washington and rapid launch/ development rate to reduce development time (cost) as much as possible.
350 million people in the US, say 4 to a household, 87.5 million household, if Starlink is internet and phone for $50 a month and only serves 4% of the population (19% live in rural areas), that is $2.1 Billion a year. If SpaceX internal launch cost is 30 million, and Elon has said the sats cost less than the launch, then 60 million total. If it required 24 launches to cover the US, that puts the cost at 1.44 Billion.
So just on a portion of the US, the constellation is paid for. Now expand that to the rest of the world.
Then add on Tesla paying for service to the Wi-Fi enabled Supercharger sites
Then add on all the airline, cruise ship, and industrial clients.
Then add the military.
They're not. Starlink can't handle high density well. I expect that that the Telcos will partner with, or defer to, SpaceX to provide last (multi)mile haul to the areas terrestrial lines are costly to service. Connect America Fund (CAF)
Totally agree. He absolutely does, both from information in public domain as well as beyond. What he doesn't care about is adhering to traditional methods of managing cashflow.
I don't wish to quibble over math too much, but my math checks out differently when using your base assumptions:
350M people x 4% = 14M people served by starlink
14M people x $50 = $700M annual, and that's before down factoring raw population into aggregate cells, like
Regardless, what remains to be seen is whether or not Starlink will offer a product compelling enough for 4% of the population to actually sign on. While ~10% of the country doesn't have internet, 0.04% of the US country doesn't have access to at least 10MB either terrestrially or through existing satellites, so I think its pretty fair to assume that anyone who wants and can afford internet in the US has it already. There's esentially nobody out there that's waiting for faster/better/cheaper internet to get internet service. They've already made the choice that shitty internet is better than no internet.
So then the exercise turns to understanding how many people will drop existing service in favor of Starlink. The issue I see is that pretty much the only significant population willing to do that will be existing satellite customers. There's ~10M or so people in that camp, many of whom will no doubt switch to starlink, so that's the good news. Of course not all of them will transition--some won't want the hassle of switching, some are probably bundled with other services, some probably hate on Elon/SpaceX/Tesla, and certainly the legacy operators will try to offer a better product when Starlink actually provides competition. As GEO customers naturally transition to Starlink, especially the customers at the top of the speed/cap bell curves, it will be easier for GEO sats to offer higher performing service. Ultimately though I suspect its going to come down to the bottom line for many of those 10M customers, and I think that bottom line is going to be pretty close across the options.
Now expand that to the rest of the world.
Where people generally have less money. (And thus will have a harder time affording any kind of service)
Where population densities are often more urban. (= the exact place satellite service doesn't work well)
Where there's already quite a bit of GEO/MEO internet service. (And so, existing competition, some of it state sponsored)
Where all kinds of companies are trying to get their piece of the connectivity pie. (like terrestrial services)
Where countries deny landing rights for satellite services. (Good luck getting open internet to China's 1B people)
To be clear, I believe Starlink will achieve the primary goal of being a profitable service provider.
50 a month, 600 a year so 12x. Household size of 4 cuts it to a quarter , so net 3x your 700 million to get my 2.1 billion.
GEO satellite is laggy, pricey, and upload speed is poor. I'm near a city, but the only option is 8 mbit dsl plus phone for 90 a month. A mile further out and that isn't even available. I'd pay $100 for tens of mbits. Coworker is fed via cellular relay.
Incremental cost in low income places is the ground station, neighbors could share a feed. Similarly, Starlink could team with small towns for backhaul.
So I'm more optomistic on the financials. Especially if Starship can get going soon enough to contribute to the constellation. Then it's sub a million in fuel per launch.
adiggs
Well-Known Member
I realize this is anecdotal, but I think the desirability of the service is better outside of city limits than you're thinking. And might be more desirable inside city limits.
The critical element in any Internet service for me is a low ping time. The throughput is also somewhat important, but it turns out that I can work from home on either 10 or 30Mb/s service, as long as the ping time is good. I'd like higher bandwidth of course, but the ping time is something I can't get around. VPN connections (and gaming) are the two primary drivers I know of for good ping times. I'd hate to lose out on my FPS / real time gaming - losing out on my VPN connection means it's time to move or get a new job / longer commute (that's life altering). As more work is being performed remotely, this portion of the market will also expand.
When my wife and I were looking for a house outside the city limits, one of the things we learned (Portland, OR area of the world) is that the good internet service mostly ends at the city limits. Outside that you're looking at expensive, low bandwidth, and high ping time service. Fine service for web browsing and watching Netflix - unusable for gaming and working from home.
So anybody that would like a remote job that is also actually remote (or at least rural), they are a potential customer. All of the current rural Internet consumers (mostly thinking US here) are potential customers, with the motivation varying with the alternative quality.
And crazily enough to me, if Starlink can be a non-sugary company to work with (it's a low bar, but surely SOMEBODY can clear it), if the service has enough bandwidth, then I'd think about switching even though I live in a suburb currently and have fiber AND cable available for me to choose between. (Where I live in suburbia, I have a choice of fiber and cable; the two companies I have to choose between are vying to see who can be the worst company to do business with.)
Lots and Lots of opportunities for a new provider that has 'cheap' last mile access to a large swath of the market.
Durning this pandemic I am expecting that many companies are going to realize that many of their employees who are currently working from home will cost them less after the pandemic if they stay at home than if they all returned to their offices, with all the additional overhead that entails. Over time, those companies will permanently reduce their office space to save money and that will increase the demand for reliable high-speed internet at home. If that internet is available outside urban areas that could encourage people to move from those areas to less expansive rural locations. Which could spur Starlink demand. Such a transition will take years to play out, but it could happen.
Maybe. Studies have been done about whether employees actually like working remotely. It turns out that given the choice, many want to come into work. There was a research paper that studied an actual event and that was the conclusion. I can dig it up, or you can search for it. Even people that thought they would like to work remotely, changed their minds after about 6 months of remote work IIRC. The other finding is that people were more productive working remotely.
Regardless, likely we will find that there is indeed an increase in remote work going forward, which will indeed spur economy wide productivity for both individual worker productivity reasons and less office overhead cost reasons.
I would not want to be investing in office space real estate right now!
strider
Active Member
This is not unique for Portland. Here in NE Oklahoma, one of my property lines is LITERALLY City Limits. No cable/fiber for me unless I want to pay several thousand dollars for the telco's contractor to trench across my property.
I also agree that a fair number of people despise their current telco enough to switch if the service is good enough.
I'm currently playing $200/month for unlimited 100Mbps service w/ ViaSat. I work from home for a tech/security company. When I do my video calls I just use my phone for voice to avoid the latency. While video lags a bit it isn't critical. Part of my job is teaching and we use virtual machines to do that. If you are deliberate with your clicking I have no problems with the latency. Bandwidth is great - the family can watch 4K videos on the AppleTV no problem. You feel it when surfing the web but you get used to it.
Bottom line is that I would gladly pay what I'm paying now for lower latency. Whether that is Starlink or ground-based wireless (US Cellular has a home internet option but I need to do more investigation before switching) I don't care.
