When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

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0xffff2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.

Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

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consumer451 an hour ago | parent [-]

I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:

> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?

It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.

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0xffff2 an hour ago | parent [-]

According to SpaceX itself 93% of the company's value is in AI IIRC.

	▲	consumer451 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No joke, I need to learn how to do this. A F50 demo client just told me that my single-builder product was better than their interal "AI chat with data" product. I need a b2b SaaS smart partner. Please contact me at username at the big G, if anyone is down.

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palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.

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luke5441 an hour ago | parent [-]

And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.

To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.

	▲	ianm218 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.