| ▲ | travisjungroth 18 hours ago |
| > This is great for regions that need to be connected That's at least a billion people. I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though. I'm writing this from an Ayahuasca center in rural Peru connected with Starlink. Before, internet was a ten minute drive into town away. We're now connected when at one side of the center. It would be nice to have it all the way into the jungle. And when you want to be disconnected, just turn your phone off or leave it behind. |
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| ▲ | nordsieck 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though. My understanding is that the monthly cost for Starlink varies pretty wildly across the world. Presumably the same would be true for this cell service - idle satellites have the same huge fixed cost and don't generate any revenue. |
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| ▲ | threeseed 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > That's at least a billion people a) Based on what we've seen in China, India etc many of those will shift towards densely populated cities or will stay and those locations will become industrialised, densely populated cities. b) In densely populated cities it doesn't make sense to use Starlink when fibre is far cheaper, has limited congestion issues and can provide gigabit speeds at a minimum. c) It's great that you're writing this in rural Peru but that is a declining use case and should not be extrapolated to the rest of the world. |
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| ▲ | chroma 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | All those points are true, but it doesn't change the fact that Starlink will be quite profitable for SpaceX. Currently, each launch of 23 Starlink satellites costs SpaceX around $50 million. To get 1,000 direct to cell satellites in orbit, they'll need to launch 44 times, costing them $2.2 billion. Due to the low orbits, air resistance causes the satellites to reenter within 5-10 years, so to maintain the constellation they'll need to spend $220-440 million per year. These costs will be much lower when they switch from Falcon 9 to Starship. Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell. That's still 80 million people. If SpaceX charges cell companies $10/month per user for the service, that's almost $10 billion per year. And that's not counting the money they make from selling Starlink Internet, which currently has over 4 million subscribers. At $100/month, that's $4.8 billion per year in revenue. So Starlink is profitable without direct to cell technology, but since they're launching the satellites anyway, they might as well collect more revenue by adding cell capability. DTC only becomes unprofitable if the cost of the extra hardware and mass is less than DTC subscriber revenue. | | |
| ▲ | threeseed 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Now let's say only 1% of the population wants Starlink direct to cell Why not 5%, 10%, 100%. It's just made up numbers. Will it be a good business for Starlink, sure. Will it change the world, probably not. | | |
| ▲ | signatoremo 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | If someone is rescued in the wilderness thanks to direct to cell connection; if children can attend online classes despite living in the rural; if science expedition can stay online even in the most remote places, then that’s changing the world. |
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| ▲ | travisjungroth 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not gonna decline to zero. There's just a really strong tendency for people all over the world to focus on their own experience. And you can actually reinforce this by zooming out too far. If you live in San Francisco, this seems like a pet use case and you can be like "What is it, 10% of the population?" But "the population" is quite the fucking denominator. I mean, it's already happening and obviously Starlink has run the numbers. So I'm largely just reacting to the tone here. | | |
| ▲ | threeseed 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | No one is saying it will decline to zero. But it will decline such that Starlink is likely to be more of a niche product similar to how satellite internet services are today. | | |
| ▲ | signatoremo 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Niche? Millions of airline and cruise passengers have been using Starlink. Industries, militaries and governments are Starlink customers. Millions of users in the rural areas. That’s some interesting definition of niche. Are you really that ignorant? | | |
| ▲ | threeseed 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 0.07% of internet users are on Starlink. By every definition that is niche. |
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| ▲ | hedora 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’m writing this from starlink ten minutes from Silicon Valley. Until recently, most of what you wrote applied to us too (our previous options were 128kbit theoretical dsl, 1 sec latency, or extremely flaky cellular). Now that a double digit percentage of people on our street have starlink, the phone company finally ran fiber to the home. Being able to make emergency calls from the many dead spots around here would be nice. |
