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Comment by Trias11 | Hacker News Reader

It feels like it’s more catering to “deep in the woods” customers vs. “anything but Comcast et.al.” customers.

The service fundamentally can't support a high density of customers due to limited capacity per satellite. So yes, Starlink is not for people who already have cable in cities or even suburbs. Starlink is for rural areas, and (in the future) vehicles like boats or planes.

You can always send up more satellites though.

At some point, the orbit is full, but I assume that is very far off.

Starlink will already be the largest satellite constellation by two orders of magnitude. To replace cable they'd probably need another couple of orders of magnitude beyond that. And satellites are not the only limited resource; spectrum may be harder to come by.

The beam width limits bandwidth to a coverage of 1 satellite per ~52 sq km

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/jiu1uq/looks_...

To be fair, that is the current implementation with current satellites. Hypothetical situations allow numerous things, including narrower beam width.

Perhaps a silly idea: could the constellation satellites act together as something like a phased array?

Given these limitations, I wonder what the theoretical maximum is for revenue, and how long it will be until they pay back the investment in launching it. It must work out favorably or they wouldn't be doing it, but is this going to make a dent in paying for Mars expeditions?

Although a large proportion of the world's population live in urban areas, the absolute number of people who don't is still billions of people.

Keep in mind that of these people a significant portion don't have access to:

• clean running water

• stable electricity supply

• disposable income

• bank accounts or means of making international payments

So I'd argue that the vast majority of the people you have in mind don't have the means to pay $500 for satellite dish, electricity for said dish, and a double-digit monthly subscription fee...

This will spawn cottage industry of one guy per village sharing his internet connection for a fixed monthly cost with other houses in the hood.

Possibly against TOS but I'm sure no one will police this too hard.

I understand that's common practice in parts of Africa with cell phones already. Including people on motorcycles driving between villages for more customers, and I understand they'll even drive to no-coverage areas, using the phone as offline storage for text messages.

As odd as it may sound, I see actual payment as the major hurdle here.

While phones come with prepaid plans that can be used with cash only, it's going to be difficult to get payment for Starlink going in many regions, unless SpaceX starts subsidiaries in various regions where this applies and offers prepaid/cash services, too.

I can only provide a back-of-the-envelope estimation for the US: 120M households[1], 20% in rural areas [2], 40% of the people cannot select between multiple ISPs [3].

At the suggested $100/mo you'd get 120M * 0.2 * $100 = $2.4Bn/mo from rural areas plus 120M * 0.8 * 0.4 * $100 ≈ $3.8Bn/mo from urban areas.

So in the US a reasonable cap would be about $6.2Bn/mo or $74.4Bn/yr.

Operational costs are difficult to estimate, but using the current numbers, $50M/launch and $250k/sat seems reasonable. At 60 sats per launch and 12k sats fleet size, build-up cost would be $10Bn launch costs plus $3B for the sats, so about $13Bn total.

With an average lifespan of 5yr/sat, 40 launches per year are required to maintain the fleet. That's an additional $2.1Bn/yr for replenishing old sats.

Costs for ground operations come on top of that.

Considering all this, even without a major game changer in launch costs (i.e. Starhip), Starlink would be very profitable even if they "only" reach %25 of the rural population in NA.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/continents-of-the-world-...

[3] https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-comparison?version=jun20...

Great napkin math. I'd like to also add that Starlink is a project that plays along really well with their main development: Starship. Starship will bring Starlink costs down, but that's not the real benefit: what they really needed was a product to increase Starship launches in the short term. They need something to prove it's reliability. Starship won't have a separate abort system, and yet Spacex wants to fly people on it. Not only do they want it human rated (NASA spec for this is >1:275 launch failure, which is still quite high), they _also_ want routine intercontinental civilian flights. New york to Singapur in 40mins. But again, to do this they need to prove they're as reliable as an airplane, and to do that they need volume. Traditional satellite market has proven very slow to move and take advantage of cheaper prices, so Spacex does the next best thing: create its own volume.

Yes that has always been the intention, much as so many people believe otherwise. SpaceX and various executives (including Shotwell and Elon Musk) have all stated that the primary customers are rural customers or even Comcast-like companies themselves (for backbone purposes).

$100/month for 50 mbps to 150 mbps is day and night for many people. There's a lot of people that live off of subsist off less than 5 mbps for over $100 month from old DSL services or old satellite internet or microwave links.

As I heard it, "Starlink isn't for those who hate their cable ISP, it's for those who wish they had a cable ISP to hate."

Starlink is for those who continue to get spam mail and email and phone calls from their cable provider after cancelling all but internet.

it is

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