Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

>Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.

Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?

...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?

View on HN

The market for airlines, ships, drones, and satellites is - quite obviously - nowhere near large enough to justify Starship lmao

80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.

>The market for airlines, ships, drones, and satellites is - quite obviously - nowhere near large enough to justify Starship lmao

The only thing that's "quite obvious" is that you're not merely incredibly, confidently ignorant, you're also so deeply uncurious you can't even be bothered to take 30 seconds to check your priors. Starlink's present annual revenue is $11.3 billion with $4.4 billion in income on that. The total global civil aviation (commercial airline) fleet size is over forty thousand aircraft [0]. Expand that to general aviation including business jets etc and it grows to something like half a million. Starlink actually publishes their general aviation plan pricing [1], which for CA is going to be one of the top two plans that don't have data limits and thus $12500 or $20000 per aircraft. From what I can find international flights account for something like 20-30% of all flights, and maybe 5-10% are intercontinental. But plans are per aircraft per month, and plenty of airliners use the same plane to fly across a continent and then also fly intercontiental, which would still need the highest plan. So using a 90/10 split that'd be an average of $13500/plane, for a TAM of $6.7 billion per year just for CA and maybe another $1-4 billion for GA (which is a lot more complicated to reason about). And the profit margins there are going to be high.

So JUST aviation, not even touching on maritime or everything else mobile, has the potential at present market size to approach the entire current revenue of Starlink by itself. And they have barely even gotten started with cellular, or doing other stuff like Earth sensing with the sats that bigger, higher power birds makes more feasible.

You claim it's "quite obvious" mobile applications don't justify Starlink. It's not any such thing.

>80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.

You need a lot more than 5x the residential plans at $55/month to approach $10-20k/month. Of course, some of those fixed points are business/enterprise customers on higher priced plans, but those customers are likely to be using Starlink already (as we are) as part of a redundancy plan alongside fiber, so your original argument about spreading fiber is perfectly irrelevant to those users anyway.

----

0: https://statbase.org/datasets/air-rail-and-water-transportat...

1: https://starlink.com/support/article/78b0428b-4546-0b7f-ea45...

Ah, I see you're very confused.

The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.

Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.

And for what it's worth, the one aircraft I've been on with Starlink Internet was (by a gigantic margin) the worst in-flight wifi experience I've had in 10 years. I'm curious how much of cost-savings it is over the current alternatives. I hope it's a lot because there's a long road between here and whenever I'd willingly buy a seat on a Starlink-connected flight again.

>Ah, I see you're very confused.

Nah, that'd be you, as well as a very insufferable asshole.

>The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.

And it clearly does, as I showed you. It's not even close, they're constrained on capabilities not demand right now. Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.

>Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.

Speaking of "lmao", now you're resorting to make believe.

>And for what it's worth

Nothing, in your case. I'm also being kind to you and only talking about the fundamental thing it does that fiber can never do, vs your hilarious suggestion that fiber will rollout worldwide to everyone on the planet in or even in the US in the foreseeable future. I don't think the US has even reached 50% fiber coverage yet.

> Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.

Similarly I can justify developing a $15 billion pizza oven because the pizza industry is $250 billion. And are you even reading the words in front of you? The question is the marginal improvement in their ability to serve that unmet demand via Starship versus Falcon. You said literally nothing about this question and still haven't. Do you understand the question?

> now you're resorting to make believe.

Describing SpaceX's accounting practices and Starlink's actual launch costs is... make believe? Very substantive response.

> I'm also being kind to you and...

I didn't claim fiber will roll out to everyone on the planet, or even everyone in the US. I said the Starlink market is clearly shrinking, and Starlink's success will ironically accelerate that shrinkage because people who get access to shitty Internet are far, far more motivated to get good connectivity than people who have no connectivity at all.

And sure, let's assume fiber hasn't reached 50%. Even broadband is a vastly superior experience to Starlink. You can disprove this by showing me any evidence of a substantial number of people who have access to fiber or broadband and opt to use Starlink as their primary ISP. I would guess this set is approximately null, as someone who ordered Starlink for his house and then filed an FCC complaint to get fiber brought out to it instead. I would have to have been literally braindead to use Starlink.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com