| ▲ | threeseed 15 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | chroma 13 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | travisjungroth 15 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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