Getting fiber to a house is relatively expensive, especially houses in more rural areas which is Starlink's main market. A Starlink satellite costs a lot more but can serve many customers.

Let's say a Starlink satellite costs $2 million all-in. (They launch about 25 at a time, the launch costs something like $25 million, add in another million for the satellite itself and operations.) They have about 10,000 satellites in orbit currently, and about 10 million customers. That's about 1,000 customers per satellite, so a five-year cost of $2,000 per customer. That's a fair bit less than it costs to run fiber to a rural house. And Starlink is pretty much a monopoly in their main markets (terrestrial telecoms is usually at least a duopoly) so they can charge more. I pay $85/month for symmetric gigabit fiber. Starlink charges $80/month for 200Mbps, or $120/month for "max." On top of that, they can charge enormous amounts for commercial users like airliners and cruise ships.

According to https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab..., Starlink revenue last year was north of $8 billion. They'd need to launch 2,000 satellites per year to maintain the current fleet. If $2 million is an accurate price tag for them, then that's $4 billion/year. Pretty nice profit, and there's a lot of room for growth.

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amluto 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This seems generally correct, but there are some things to note.

Once fiber is installed, it’s not particularly expensive to maintain, indefinitely. That $2k/customer needs to be paid again every five years, whereas for fiber it’s much closer to being a one time cost. (To be fair, fiber still depreciates and gets damaged.) And fiber is not that expensive to install: Starlink clearly wins for truly rural areas, but for merely low-density suburban areas it’s not nearly so clear.

Starlink’s performance is not awesome compared to high quality DOCSIS fiber deployments, so they will struggle in areas that are well served by the latter, which covers quite a lot of the population by ability to pay, at least in developed markets. So there’s a limited total addressable market issue.

Of course, Starlink may have other valuable applications, especially military.

	▲	wat10000 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think they're competitive anywhere a halfway decent terrestrial option is available. But there are enough places where those aren't available to get them 10 million customers and growing, which is enough. If I were them, my big concern would be getting overtaken by the buildout of cellular connectivity. A good 5G connection could be competitive. But if their direct-to-cell stuff works out, we might see the opposite: rural cellular infrastructure stops being built out or even diminishes because it's cheaper to provide coverage by satellite.