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> There's no inherent reason for this to be a winner takes all market.

Economics?

Competitors would have to match SpaceX's vertical integration: Satellite design, reusable launches at cost, its exiting armada of satellites, and its moving target of customer penetration. The latter is huge. Starlink is clearly not satisfied leaving any satellite demand on the table.

There is no military on Earth that has demand for satellite bandwidth approaching anything like SpaceX's, which is basically being designed to meet the needs of the whole planet.

Note that militaries (US, China, Russia, Europe, ...) have their custom means of communicating on planet, for unique reasons, but the vast majority of their communication is over commercial cell phones. This is no different.

If anyone was going to have a chance, it was Bezos. But neither his launch capabilities, or big satellite constellation plans, have amounted to much.

China will feel the need to try. But they won't have SpaceX's customer base to support a fraction of a comparable effort. (And I say that as someone who has tremendous respect for the multi-decade cadence of their space capability march.)

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modeless 9 hours ago | parent [-]

"SpaceX is really good and it's hard to compete with them" is not an economic reason for it to be winner takes all. Economic reasons would be, for example, regulations that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit others from competing, as are present in many terrestrial ISP markets. Some way for SpaceX to corner the market for some essential resource like spectrum or orbits and exclude competitors that way.

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michaelt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm no economics expert, but I gather certain industries are known as 'natural monopolies' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

I don't know what the precise defining lines are, but I can certainly see how you'd make more money running an electricity cable to a home with no electricity, than running a second cable to a home that already had an electricity supply in place.

And Wikipedia says "frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate [...] examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc" - starlink does sound like capital-intensive telecommunications.

Of course, even if nobody cares to take on Starlink in the broadband satellite internet market, there are a bunch of incumbent cable and cell phone companies. So it's not like starlink are on course to an internet access monopoly.

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cjblomqvist 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Vertical integration is definitely one. It's such a big factor it can cause regulators to break up a company. See Google/Chrome as an example from last week.

	▲	modeless 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"SpaceX is vertically integrated" is also not an economic reason for the space ISP market to be winner takes all. Vertical integration doesn't cause breakups. Anticompetitive behavior causes breakups, with or without vertical integration. And vertical integration is not some kind of cheat code to suppress competition. It can be a business advantage but it can also easily be a disadvantage.