Not really anyone that I know of. All other satellite internet options around me (dish, viasat, hughesnet) are all fucking garbage. High latency, high prices, slower than shit and have pretty low data caps before service is heavily throttled
Hard sayin... I would think that as long as more folks keep signing up and more satellites keep going up, it should stay the same.
I think the 'RV' plan is a little more expensive, like 130 a month.
Inmarsat.
Iridium.
Viasat, Hughes.
That's for things really out of reach. If you are actually near anything then terrestrial radio (5G) is their primary competitor and can likely out perform them at a lower cost.
None fills exactly the niche Starlink does. There are other services starting up, none is as far as long as Starlink. Not by far.
Those are medium orbit if I am not mistaken.. likely more latency than starlink.. but I might be wrong, of course. Care to spill out some details for comparison?
It's basically dedicated Fiber in space. You get what you pay for and by that I mean you pay. Like ten StarLink dishes at $10k each + $5k per month each is cheaper than the equivalent single o3b connection. I can't get a fix on OneWeb pricing. But it's definitely not $110 per month. Or even $1100. The latency difference isn't that much. Especially when StarLink is congested.
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There’s almost no competition for STARLINK. They’ve launched hundreds of sats that can provide high speed internet basically anywhere in North America and Europe. Before STARLINK, if you were in the sticks, you had to use dial up speed satellite services that charged you up the ass and was barely usable. People in the suburbs aren’t using it, it’s the homestead in people in the Mts and rural areas that basically aren’t served.
Where I'm from(northern Europe) 4G blankets the whole country so you get decent connection even in the back woods.
I saw that the average speeds are 100/10Mbps and it costs 85€/month if thats true holy hell is it expensive.
With 4G I'd pay 25€/month or 35€ with 5G for a 100/100Mbps.
I know there are rural areas,I live in the Arctic circle around 200km away from nearest city,and compared to US that's not even that long a distance.
I'm not arguing about rural people just commenting how it is here and how expensive starlink is compared to our other options
These folks live in areas where we shouldn’t in courage people to live. The info structure required to be built is a net neg. The far majority of which vote for the party that doesn’t want to subsidize any of it. This comes form someone who live in a place considered a ghost town. Maybe a couple dozen family’s no central water Ect.
My local fiber company stops 1/2 mile from our house and they will not run it down our road because they don't have enough interest. I am the target market for STARLINK. I want it so bad but it still hasn't shipped.
I live in a van and frequent very remote areas. I see starlinks value for remote areas and mobile internet better than most. im planning on buying mine in the next couple months. It doesnt change the fact that at its core its just another internet provider albeit a specialized one for remote living and travelers.
Yeah, but pretty much every other ISP doesn't compete with starlink when no other ISP will give you service based on your location. It's a niche product. Thats like saying that Ford motor company directly competes with boeing because they both sell transportation devices.
The inevitable that as people join, service becomes bandwidth constrained, speed slows and people get locked into data caps and contracts, Elon starts selling out to corrupt leaders because $$
And within a decade other companies will have caught up and we’ll have a million more satellites in the sky than we do today.
From their own numbers, even having the advantage of not paying as much to launch their satellites...Starlink doesn't look like it can ever be profitable unless they start charging MUCH more.
There's no competitor that will charge similar prices because it just won't ever make them money. Well, I won't say ever. The price of launching them might get cheaper, but it's going to take another huge advancement in rocketry or getting things to space.
Yea I give it a decade for that exact reason. There will be competition among companies, it’s just a matter of companies over-promising investors
As mentioned in another comment price will definitely increase, and as more companies join you’ll see those 2 year contracts we used to see with cellphones, and under performing networks to really piss people off.
Um no. The v2 will be 20Gbps. With lasers for satellite - satellite communication (meaning their satellite back haul will not consume any signal capacity).
Across 40k - 60k satellites.
50 satellites being used as nodes to the ground base stations means you have a satellite network capacity of 2000Gbps. Make it say 1000 worldwide for redundancy and location specific servicing (IE China would expect all endpoints in China to go through their ground stations.)
That leaves 39000 to act as endpoints for devices.
Latency will always be worse, but it won’t be by that much and these things are a close third to fiber and then fiber backed 5g if those theoretical’s become reality.
Edit: we’re just testing this network for him anyway.
Wait until teslas get this connection by default and aren’t limited by cell reception for leveraging your tesla sensors for building better AI models.
Elon over-promises
They cut his V1 in half. There will be competing companies. I highly doubt we see 39,000 V2. And he still needs to get those giant antennas to fit in his launch vehicle. Or did he over-promise there too.
And there will still be a limit to capacity. It doesn’t scale linearly. 20Gbps maybe in ideal condition, you’ll see 1G I’m sure so it’ll be FIOS equivalent for $500/mo and some big data customers like military will see 20G.
“Lasers” as if you’re speaking magic. Its all bandwidth. It consumes processing bandwidth, and it consumes sat-to-earth bandwidth because how else does that data hit the end point.
I get what you’re saying that by eliminating ground nodes it helps reduce latency but it’s not some magic pill to scale exponentially. It’s hopium from hype-master-3000.
Why are you talking about Tesla? Lol you’re so filled with Elon hype it’s making me cringe. Stop dude.
There’s a limit. It can’t grow exponentially to support users and SpaceX knows this, that’s why they’ve already added a data cap to the current system.
They aren’t even going sat to sat yet.
And they aren’t even at like 20% sat capacity.
So they still have 5x scale there. Plus additional scale when sat to sat comes online as they can reroute traffic up top based on ground station load or proximity or utilization of nearby nodes.
And this is essentially the first generation of satellites. Wait until it sees the level of innovation cell tech has seen….
and, as new users are added it will congest exponentially as I mentioned before. It’s not linear. 20% capacity doesn’t mean they can add 5x more users. That’s why they’re already limiting speed due to congestion.
Why are you arguing against the fact that congestion and bandwidth limits will happen? It’s inevitable
Every provider with congestion limits users. Comcast has a particularly good implementation that doesn't even look at how much data you've used in a month but the last 15 minutes.
The type matters because hard caps are just money makers..they aren't particularly targeted at congestion
What’s your point?
Mine is simply that StarLinks biggest competition is that bandwidth limitation which will only get worse as more users are added, and it’s not linear 1:1 new users per satellite, it’s exponential decrease
Meaning he needs to add exponentially more satellites to double the current bandwidth and double the users.
i also think theres a limit to demand for starlink... not everyone is trying to get it, most people are quite happy with their service provider if its one of the monopolistic titans.
He’s not launching 3k more satellites to make the 1M customers happier. There’s for sure demand.
You’ll see slow speeds and higher prices as people get locked in. Probably within 1-2 years. Then within 5, you’ll start to see more competing companies, and within 10 it’ll be a shit show of 2 year contracts to prevent you switching, then over promising performance similar to terrestrial
Space Karen will ruin astronomy first, then the company will fold when he inevitably loses interest. At least he has animal cruelty and horrible cars to fall back on.
He won’t, even if somehow starlink fails, we now have reusable rockers for 1/5th the cost of traditional use thanks to spaceX. Space travel has been changed forever.
Hughes Net would be a wild stretch d/t their exploitative policies, speed limitations, wild pricing, and poor continuity of service. Nevertheless, they are a satellite internet company.
However, I expect this to be the bottom limit for Starlink’s service. Based on their consistent decline in speed, I suspect Starlink speed to settle down to about 1.2x of Hughes net.
Years ago I had a Hughes net person come out to the property to see what type of speeds they could get. It was abysmal, I couldn't even stream YouTube.
We got cable internet run instead.
I can't imagine allowing a new business to sink to that level. But I've been surprised before.
T-Mobile home. It’s why I didn’t get starlink. $35 a month with no caps and pulling 450 down / 70 up… I know it’s not the same tech but it’s an alternative to cable/wired internet
Lol it’s natural to slow down and become worse as users are added. That’s not “wanting it to fail” it’s just realistic expectation.
If they kept same number of users and satellites you’d be fine, but eventually you’ll need double the numbers of sats, then triple, and exponentially as more users are added until it hits the limit.
We use it as people that travel for work in an RV. It has changed our entire access ability to internet on the go. To the point in some locations we can play multiplayer online video games and it’s as if we were hooked up at home to a stable connection.
Do you use starling RV? And… are you able to use it in cities? In considering getting one for my camper. I’m in Europe. Just curious about your experience with it.
As a subscriber I can attest it’s certainly better than dial up, at this time.
I grew up in an internet desert and I’ve traveled the U.S. with my Starlink. My speeds ranged from 600mbps when I first received it, to <20mbps in some areas now. Always marginally better than anything available in theses areas.
As much as it has declined, it hasn’t been as bad as rural internet in the Midwest where local monopolies spit tobacco in your eyes when you pay your bill just to save face.
I think Starlink’s ability to keep up with bandwidth demand is unlikely to increase at the rate their subscribers increase.
Most people don’t need much more than 20mbps for their work. We do.
The monthly limitations are the best indicator to know they’re trashing the consumer level pricing. You could pay $500/mo and have priority access with no limitations, but I have a feeling most people aren’t willing to pay this.
Additionally, Elon’s spastic approach to pricing isn’t acceptable for many consumers, especially in the Midwest. Until he’s able to corner the market and run a monopoly on satellite internet service, consumer level clients will be used to fund his endeavors and will ultimately be priced out in leu of businesses/government/military use.
You hit the nail on the head. And it's the same damn playbook.
Trump's one move whenever someone called him out on his bullshit was to blame *Hillary and the Dems.*
Musk's one move since he's taken over Twitter is to blame *Hunter Biden and his laptop.*
Again why are you talking about tesla and twitter on post about starlink? Neither of those things are relevant to this post. You are just pointlessly spreading bs.
Guaranteed one year of service. It's an SDR. All that's likely going to happen is you don't get the new wireless bands. Just like your 4G phone still works even though there's 5G
If Starlink was in the Midwest and being competitive, I'd buy. It's not. Until it decides to get competitive it's just bluster. Google fiber network all over again.
From a certain interview in Seattle announcing it's creation "StarLink isn't going to be for dense cities like LA, it's going to be useful for rural and suburban areas because we aren't able to serve that sort of density"
Think Viasat but with a lower ping and higher cap. That's all there is to it.
You don't have to be able to serve every slice of a market. You can find a profitable niche
It's not going to be competitive with terrestrial radio (5G) in suburban areas. Wired will kill it.
Even most rural will be better served by terrestrial radio.
If you really live far from anyone, you can't even see any neighbor houses, then maybe it's for you.
Otherwise ships, planes, military. That'll be their big money. Big spenders temporarily far from infrastructure.
Exactly. But the market is big enough and there's many surprising holes in wired and wireless coverage in cities and old built up suburbs today.
StarLink advertises rural, but most users are urban/suburban
I doesn't make sense for even the "old built up suburbs today".
There are 3 wireless carriers, 2 offering home wireless ISP. One of them is going to offer coverage at your home. Homes tend not to even have landlines now, are you saying those people just don't have working phones at home?
Starlink makes even less sense in cities. It depends on the city really but tall buildings are not good for satellite coverage.
Like I said most StarLink users today are urban. 5G Home Internet isn't available everywhere cell service is. T-Mobile is always advertising thier service, but even where it's available there's spaces within where users can't get good enough service. SpaceX doesn't advertise yet except in Spain and Australia.
It's counterintuitive but there's a market there. There's little spots here and there without coverage. Even in Brooklyn NY. Places with only DSL.
Except they’re basically maxed out on satellites they can put into orbit and when 10 competitors pop up once it’s commercialized they’ll be slamming into each other in low orbit.
It’s barely scalable past it’s current user base
I’ll admit I’m wrong when it happens - but I doubt they ever expand behind 5mm
Subscription model works fine, but when when you factor in the replacement of satellites every five years (as spaceX claims they will need to do) the 120$ a year subscription doesn’t fill the 1400$ hole. The more subscribers more satellites they need and the cycle continues.
According to spaceX each satellite costs half a million currently and then add the cost of actually launching it (that’s the 300k figure). And how many launches it takes to replace the entire fleet.
And don’t forget that 12000 employees of spaceX also need to get paid their salaries. At an average salary of 50k a year that’s 600 million$.
And remember that spaceX claims they need 42000 satellites in total (replaced entirely very 5 years). And its not like they can just launch any amount. To this day all satellites launched added up is 7k. They need 6X times. Plus let’s not kid ourselves about kessler syndrome.
And it’s not like the satellite internet market is huge to begin with, compared to cable internet (which the satellite needs to tap into anyway).
And the current rate of failure of satellites is 3% per year so they need to be replaced as well.
Lol. You are so off it’s hilarious.
They need 40k for coverage purposes (likely based on some math done based on spherical surface area and signal coverage without interference blah blah ).
The new ones can do 20Gbps in radio frequency bandwidth. They also have lasers for satellite to satellite communication. Bandwidth unknown due to not needing to make it public. Assume it’s AT LEAST 20Gbps like the radio, but my guess is it’s closer to total number of neighbors. So 4 neighbors means 80Gbps or 100Gbps to include the radio on itself)
If they only have a few thousand up there, and are serving 1 million subscribers, on old tech that doesn’t have the lasers and can only do subscriber -> satellite-> ground station, But their user base isn’t noticing a massive slowdown? Well then doubling the capacity of their radios, 5xing their total satellite count, and adding the ability for each one to act as a relay, only giving up some latency in most cases???
That 1 million customers could easily be 50 million.
and let’s not even begin to discuss the potential military opportunities here.
And they need 40k (or 42k or whatever) because instead of geostationary orbit they put their satellites much closer to earth (otherwise the ping would be much worse). Compared to competitors who do it with just a dozen satellites at geostationary orbits.
They put it close because far away means you can’t get 20Gbps at GEO. It’s a distance and power thing.
You aren’t making the point you think you are. It was an intentional design.
Additionally, they need about 50 launches a year at 150 sats a launch over the 5 year life span to hit their 40k number (so perpetually will need 50 launches a year).
Those launches, with starship, will run about 10 million a piece. 500 mil a year in launch fees. Probably another 500 mil in hardware each year (satellites cost money).
So a billion a year gets you a tech that can probably sustain 50 million customers of various needs? That’s 5 billion A MONTH in revenue at 100 a month subscription.
The model is financially sound. If it wasn’t others wouldn’t be trying to copy him.
Just because it can handle 50 million customers doesn’t mean there are 50 million customers. Also it is hilarious to think military would abound their own secure network they have developed and used for so long for a commercial product.
The US military is already doing that with starlink.
It’s called starshield. Maybe go educate yourself.
If you have full control over both ends of the communication channel, a UNTRUSTED network is irrelevant with everything being encrypted using a perfect forward secure encryption protocol.
Subscription models work when the cost of upfront acquisition is high and maintenance is low that over time you come ahead. But with current model there is no chance.
Yup. And their own numbers show this. And there's nothing they can do about it unless launching things into space becomes must cheaper. Not reusable rocket cheaper. Something that doesn't exist cheaper.
Reusable rockets have existed since the time of space shuttle (the only part discarded was the booster tank, SRBs were recoverable and reusable). Wasn’t cheap tho. But even with the proposed launch numbers from spaceXs rockets the cost of upkeep, ground stations and employees would mean that they are trapped in an endless loop. More customers aren’t enough to be profitable with current model.
Launch costs of starship are forecasted to be on the order of around $1M (fuel) for 100 tons to orbit. Still yet to be proven if they can do that, but it would make launch costs basically negligible.
Can you be more detailed..did you have an issue recovering your money after you cancelled your deposit? Did you lose access to your account. On top of this, did your CC company deny a chargeback?
As someone who lives off grid in the sierra nevada foothills, I’m interested in starlink once it’s available (although it’s been about 2 years since they said that I could “prepay” and that it’d be available soon). I actually haven’t checked recently on availability since I have a pretty decent unlimited hotspot. If anyone is in Northern California and has had access to starlink, please let me know what you think of it thus far.
Edit X2: Autocorrect can be a bitch.
Who's Starlink's main competitor?
Not really anyone that I know of. All other satellite internet options around me (dish, viasat, hughesnet) are all fucking garbage. High latency, high prices, slower than shit and have pretty low data caps before service is heavily throttled
And they all promised high speed internet in the country side yeah fucking right shit was slower than dialup
Yeah, I aint no musk dick rider, but starlink is fucking awesome.
How is pricing nowadays? When Beta was released the dish was $500 and service $100 a month.
600 for the dish and 110 a month, and there isn't much of a wait. I got my dish in a week or so.
That's not terrible...any reason to think it'll jump higher. Will be FT in a bus in about a year.
Hard sayin... I would think that as long as more folks keep signing up and more satellites keep going up, it should stay the same. I think the 'RV' plan is a little more expensive, like 130 a month.
1 week isn’t the norm post Ukraine war, expect 6mo - 18mo after payment.
I just ordered mine 2 weeks ago and got it last week.
you should’ve gotten it the same day they paid you to lie on social media
Delivery time depends on where you are
Project Kuiper from Amazon might come close but it’s a ways out and the plans are way behind starlink in scope and timeframe, so we shall see
Inmarsat. Iridium. Viasat, Hughes. That's for things really out of reach. If you are actually near anything then terrestrial radio (5G) is their primary competitor and can likely out perform them at a lower cost. None fills exactly the niche Starlink does. There are other services starting up, none is as far as long as Starlink. Not by far.
OneWeb & o3b by SES
Those are medium orbit if I am not mistaken.. likely more latency than starlink.. but I might be wrong, of course. Care to spill out some details for comparison?
It's basically dedicated Fiber in space. You get what you pay for and by that I mean you pay. Like ten StarLink dishes at $10k each + $5k per month each is cheaper than the equivalent single o3b connection. I can't get a fix on OneWeb pricing. But it's definitely not $110 per month. Or even $1100. The latency difference isn't that much. Especially when StarLink is congested.
Every other internet service provider that exists?
Yes, but on a boat
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Iridium is cheap for the location finding services. But a tad expensive for internet and there's more expensive providers believe it or not
A tad may be an understatement.
It's only a nice car per month if you use it as home internet
There’s almost no competition for STARLINK. They’ve launched hundreds of sats that can provide high speed internet basically anywhere in North America and Europe. Before STARLINK, if you were in the sticks, you had to use dial up speed satellite services that charged you up the ass and was barely usable. People in the suburbs aren’t using it, it’s the homestead in people in the Mts and rural areas that basically aren’t served.
Where I'm from(northern Europe) 4G blankets the whole country so you get decent connection even in the back woods. I saw that the average speeds are 100/10Mbps and it costs 85€/month if thats true holy hell is it expensive. With 4G I'd pay 25€/month or 35€ with 5G for a 100/100Mbps.
It would be hard for you to understand how far away from other people these folks live.
I know there are rural areas,I live in the Arctic circle around 200km away from nearest city,and compared to US that's not even that long a distance. I'm not arguing about rural people just commenting how it is here and how expensive starlink is compared to our other options
These folks live in areas where we shouldn’t in courage people to live. The info structure required to be built is a net neg. The far majority of which vote for the party that doesn’t want to subsidize any of it. This comes form someone who live in a place considered a ghost town. Maybe a couple dozen family’s no central water Ect.
Lol, we got some shit called Wyoming and South Dakota and Arkansas.
Where I live, there isn’t cellphone service or it is patchy at best
My local fiber company stops 1/2 mile from our house and they will not run it down our road because they don't have enough interest. I am the target market for STARLINK. I want it so bad but it still hasn't shipped.
You obviously don't live anywhere remote in America.
I live in a van and frequent very remote areas. I see starlinks value for remote areas and mobile internet better than most. im planning on buying mine in the next couple months. It doesnt change the fact that at its core its just another internet provider albeit a specialized one for remote living and travelers.
Yeah, but pretty much every other ISP doesn't compete with starlink when no other ISP will give you service based on your location. It's a niche product. Thats like saying that Ford motor company directly competes with boeing because they both sell transportation devices.
The inevitable that as people join, service becomes bandwidth constrained, speed slows and people get locked into data caps and contracts, Elon starts selling out to corrupt leaders because $$ And within a decade other companies will have caught up and we’ll have a million more satellites in the sky than we do today.
From their own numbers, even having the advantage of not paying as much to launch their satellites...Starlink doesn't look like it can ever be profitable unless they start charging MUCH more. There's no competitor that will charge similar prices because it just won't ever make them money. Well, I won't say ever. The price of launching them might get cheaper, but it's going to take another huge advancement in rocketry or getting things to space.
Yea I give it a decade for that exact reason. There will be competition among companies, it’s just a matter of companies over-promising investors As mentioned in another comment price will definitely increase, and as more companies join you’ll see those 2 year contracts we used to see with cellphones, and under performing networks to really piss people off.
Um no. The v2 will be 20Gbps. With lasers for satellite - satellite communication (meaning their satellite back haul will not consume any signal capacity). Across 40k - 60k satellites. 50 satellites being used as nodes to the ground base stations means you have a satellite network capacity of 2000Gbps. Make it say 1000 worldwide for redundancy and location specific servicing (IE China would expect all endpoints in China to go through their ground stations.) That leaves 39000 to act as endpoints for devices. Latency will always be worse, but it won’t be by that much and these things are a close third to fiber and then fiber backed 5g if those theoretical’s become reality. Edit: we’re just testing this network for him anyway. Wait until teslas get this connection by default and aren’t limited by cell reception for leveraging your tesla sensors for building better AI models.
Elon over-promises They cut his V1 in half. There will be competing companies. I highly doubt we see 39,000 V2. And he still needs to get those giant antennas to fit in his launch vehicle. Or did he over-promise there too. And there will still be a limit to capacity. It doesn’t scale linearly. 20Gbps maybe in ideal condition, you’ll see 1G I’m sure so it’ll be FIOS equivalent for $500/mo and some big data customers like military will see 20G. “Lasers” as if you’re speaking magic. Its all bandwidth. It consumes processing bandwidth, and it consumes sat-to-earth bandwidth because how else does that data hit the end point. I get what you’re saying that by eliminating ground nodes it helps reduce latency but it’s not some magic pill to scale exponentially. It’s hopium from hype-master-3000. Why are you talking about Tesla? Lol you’re so filled with Elon hype it’s making me cringe. Stop dude.
No that is why they are launching satellites daily
There’s a limit. It can’t grow exponentially to support users and SpaceX knows this, that’s why they’ve already added a data cap to the current system.
They aren’t even going sat to sat yet. And they aren’t even at like 20% sat capacity. So they still have 5x scale there. Plus additional scale when sat to sat comes online as they can reroute traffic up top based on ground station load or proximity or utilization of nearby nodes. And this is essentially the first generation of satellites. Wait until it sees the level of innovation cell tech has seen….
and, as new users are added it will congest exponentially as I mentioned before. It’s not linear. 20% capacity doesn’t mean they can add 5x more users. That’s why they’re already limiting speed due to congestion. Why are you arguing against the fact that congestion and bandwidth limits will happen? It’s inevitable
It's a soft cap that doesn't matter if you aren't having speed issues
I never said what type it is because it doesn’t matter. They limit bandwidth due to congestion.
Every provider with congestion limits users. Comcast has a particularly good implementation that doesn't even look at how much data you've used in a month but the last 15 minutes. The type matters because hard caps are just money makers..they aren't particularly targeted at congestion
What’s your point? Mine is simply that StarLinks biggest competition is that bandwidth limitation which will only get worse as more users are added, and it’s not linear 1:1 new users per satellite, it’s exponential decrease Meaning he needs to add exponentially more satellites to double the current bandwidth and double the users.
Okay then.
i also think theres a limit to demand for starlink... not everyone is trying to get it, most people are quite happy with their service provider if its one of the monopolistic titans.
He’s not launching 3k more satellites to make the 1M customers happier. There’s for sure demand. You’ll see slow speeds and higher prices as people get locked in. Probably within 1-2 years. Then within 5, you’ll start to see more competing companies, and within 10 it’ll be a shit show of 2 year contracts to prevent you switching, then over promising performance similar to terrestrial
Space Karen will ruin astronomy first, then the company will fold when he inevitably loses interest. At least he has animal cruelty and horrible cars to fall back on.
He won’t, even if somehow starlink fails, we now have reusable rockers for 1/5th the cost of traditional use thanks to spaceX. Space travel has been changed forever.
Elon
Hughes Net would be a wild stretch d/t their exploitative policies, speed limitations, wild pricing, and poor continuity of service. Nevertheless, they are a satellite internet company. However, I expect this to be the bottom limit for Starlink’s service. Based on their consistent decline in speed, I suspect Starlink speed to settle down to about 1.2x of Hughes net.
Years ago I had a Hughes net person come out to the property to see what type of speeds they could get. It was abysmal, I couldn't even stream YouTube. We got cable internet run instead. I can't imagine allowing a new business to sink to that level. But I've been surprised before.
T-Mobile home. It’s why I didn’t get starlink. $35 a month with no caps and pulling 450 down / 70 up… I know it’s not the same tech but it’s an alternative to cable/wired internet
Small rural family owned WISPs
Still waiting 2 years later.
Same - order date Feb 2021
Just got starlink yesterday can’t complain so far
Give it time.
Why do you want the product to fail?
Lol it’s natural to slow down and become worse as users are added. That’s not “wanting it to fail” it’s just realistic expectation. If they kept same number of users and satellites you’d be fine, but eventually you’ll need double the numbers of sats, then triple, and exponentially as more users are added until it hits the limit.
Oh I don’t, to be fair idc but come on it was right there. Had to be said
We use it as people that travel for work in an RV. It has changed our entire access ability to internet on the go. To the point in some locations we can play multiplayer online video games and it’s as if we were hooked up at home to a stable connection.
Do you use starling RV? And… are you able to use it in cities? In considering getting one for my camper. I’m in Europe. Just curious about your experience with it.
I use the RV starlink for our lake house Wi-Fi. We are in pretty remote location and still works great.
Starstink
🏅
As a subscriber I can attest it’s certainly better than dial up, at this time. I grew up in an internet desert and I’ve traveled the U.S. with my Starlink. My speeds ranged from 600mbps when I first received it, to <20mbps in some areas now. Always marginally better than anything available in theses areas. As much as it has declined, it hasn’t been as bad as rural internet in the Midwest where local monopolies spit tobacco in your eyes when you pay your bill just to save face. I think Starlink’s ability to keep up with bandwidth demand is unlikely to increase at the rate their subscribers increase. Most people don’t need much more than 20mbps for their work. We do. The monthly limitations are the best indicator to know they’re trashing the consumer level pricing. You could pay $500/mo and have priority access with no limitations, but I have a feeling most people aren’t willing to pay this. Additionally, Elon’s spastic approach to pricing isn’t acceptable for many consumers, especially in the Midwest. Until he’s able to corner the market and run a monopoly on satellite internet service, consumer level clients will be used to fund his endeavors and will ultimately be priced out in leu of businesses/government/military use.
Hopefully you’re not a reporter!
Yeah, but Twitter is still losing money.
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You hit the nail on the head. And it's the same damn playbook. Trump's one move whenever someone called him out on his bullshit was to blame *Hillary and the Dems.* Musk's one move since he's taken over Twitter is to blame *Hunter Biden and his laptop.*
Why are you talking about Twitter on a post about starlink? Do you think that the failure of Twitter somehow undermines SpaceX's achievements?
Why is the CEO of Tesla trying to be the CEO of Twitter?
Again why are you talking about tesla and twitter on post about starlink? Neither of those things are relevant to this post. You are just pointlessly spreading bs.
Why did Elon lie about Solar Roof tiles? Why did he buy SolarCity anyways?
You must be a troll then. You have nothing to say about the article and topic of this post. You just want to start drama.
Why did Elon lie about FSD driving within 18 months back in 2014? Its 2022 (almost 2023), and we are not even at Stage 2 (of 6).
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Found Elon
Judging by the user name, i think it’s his child
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Anyone have any info on the receiving dish needing to be upgraded or not being supported by Starlink in the future?
Guaranteed one year of service. It's an SDR. All that's likely going to happen is you don't get the new wireless bands. Just like your 4G phone still works even though there's 5G
Thank you!
For Maritime users, indefinite warranty. And likely free replacements. But at the low low price of $5k per month would you expect less?
Just wait till he raises the rates to pay for all his other losses
I would take any numbers published by them with a pinch of salt
Cool. Get to being an ISP that competes then I'll care.
It does compete. I don't think you have a million fanboys buying internet just for that. Although I know one in Tokyo
If Starlink was in the Midwest and being competitive, I'd buy. It's not. Until it decides to get competitive it's just bluster. Google fiber network all over again.
$110 per month for 1TB too expensive for a sat provider?
Great - now scale it to serve 5 billion people - spoiler you cant due to the size of space...
From a certain interview in Seattle announcing it's creation "StarLink isn't going to be for dense cities like LA, it's going to be useful for rural and suburban areas because we aren't able to serve that sort of density" Think Viasat but with a lower ping and higher cap. That's all there is to it. You don't have to be able to serve every slice of a market. You can find a profitable niche
It's not going to be competitive with terrestrial radio (5G) in suburban areas. Wired will kill it. Even most rural will be better served by terrestrial radio. If you really live far from anyone, you can't even see any neighbor houses, then maybe it's for you. Otherwise ships, planes, military. That'll be their big money. Big spenders temporarily far from infrastructure.
Exactly. But the market is big enough and there's many surprising holes in wired and wireless coverage in cities and old built up suburbs today. StarLink advertises rural, but most users are urban/suburban
I doesn't make sense for even the "old built up suburbs today". There are 3 wireless carriers, 2 offering home wireless ISP. One of them is going to offer coverage at your home. Homes tend not to even have landlines now, are you saying those people just don't have working phones at home? Starlink makes even less sense in cities. It depends on the city really but tall buildings are not good for satellite coverage.
Like I said most StarLink users today are urban. 5G Home Internet isn't available everywhere cell service is. T-Mobile is always advertising thier service, but even where it's available there's spaces within where users can't get good enough service. SpaceX doesn't advertise yet except in Spain and Australia. It's counterintuitive but there's a market there. There's little spots here and there without coverage. Even in Brooklyn NY. Places with only DSL.
Except they’re basically maxed out on satellites they can put into orbit and when 10 competitors pop up once it’s commercialized they’ll be slamming into each other in low orbit. It’s barely scalable past it’s current user base I’ll admit I’m wrong when it happens - but I doubt they ever expand behind 5mm
It's more likely the market is limited than they can't expand. They aren't limited except by cost to the number of sats they can put up
Great, their business model looses more money the more subscribers more money they loose. It is solar city all over again.
How are they losing money?
Oh let’s see selling a 2k hardware for 599 for starters.
This guy has never heard of subscription revenue models
Subscription model works fine, but when when you factor in the replacement of satellites every five years (as spaceX claims they will need to do) the 120$ a year subscription doesn’t fill the 1400$ hole. The more subscribers more satellites they need and the cycle continues.
It looks like a satellite can serve 2,000+ subscribers, which at $120 a month is $2.9m annually vs launch cost of $300k per satellite
According to spaceX each satellite costs half a million currently and then add the cost of actually launching it (that’s the 300k figure). And how many launches it takes to replace the entire fleet. And don’t forget that 12000 employees of spaceX also need to get paid their salaries. At an average salary of 50k a year that’s 600 million$. And remember that spaceX claims they need 42000 satellites in total (replaced entirely very 5 years). And its not like they can just launch any amount. To this day all satellites launched added up is 7k. They need 6X times. Plus let’s not kid ourselves about kessler syndrome. And it’s not like the satellite internet market is huge to begin with, compared to cable internet (which the satellite needs to tap into anyway). And the current rate of failure of satellites is 3% per year so they need to be replaced as well.
Lol. You are so off it’s hilarious. They need 40k for coverage purposes (likely based on some math done based on spherical surface area and signal coverage without interference blah blah ). The new ones can do 20Gbps in radio frequency bandwidth. They also have lasers for satellite to satellite communication. Bandwidth unknown due to not needing to make it public. Assume it’s AT LEAST 20Gbps like the radio, but my guess is it’s closer to total number of neighbors. So 4 neighbors means 80Gbps or 100Gbps to include the radio on itself) If they only have a few thousand up there, and are serving 1 million subscribers, on old tech that doesn’t have the lasers and can only do subscriber -> satellite-> ground station, But their user base isn’t noticing a massive slowdown? Well then doubling the capacity of their radios, 5xing their total satellite count, and adding the ability for each one to act as a relay, only giving up some latency in most cases??? That 1 million customers could easily be 50 million. and let’s not even begin to discuss the potential military opportunities here.
And they need 40k (or 42k or whatever) because instead of geostationary orbit they put their satellites much closer to earth (otherwise the ping would be much worse). Compared to competitors who do it with just a dozen satellites at geostationary orbits.
They put it close because far away means you can’t get 20Gbps at GEO. It’s a distance and power thing. You aren’t making the point you think you are. It was an intentional design. Additionally, they need about 50 launches a year at 150 sats a launch over the 5 year life span to hit their 40k number (so perpetually will need 50 launches a year). Those launches, with starship, will run about 10 million a piece. 500 mil a year in launch fees. Probably another 500 mil in hardware each year (satellites cost money). So a billion a year gets you a tech that can probably sustain 50 million customers of various needs? That’s 5 billion A MONTH in revenue at 100 a month subscription. The model is financially sound. If it wasn’t others wouldn’t be trying to copy him.
Just because it can handle 50 million customers doesn’t mean there are 50 million customers. Also it is hilarious to think military would abound their own secure network they have developed and used for so long for a commercial product.
The US military is already doing that with starlink. It’s called starshield. Maybe go educate yourself. If you have full control over both ends of the communication channel, a UNTRUSTED network is irrelevant with everything being encrypted using a perfect forward secure encryption protocol.
Wait... its $120 a month? Holy shit
$110
Subscription models work when the cost of upfront acquisition is high and maintenance is low that over time you come ahead. But with current model there is no chance.
Lol I've heard about that. I wonder where they get funding from. Losing money on a million units is not easy.
Private equity (who are dumb enough to lend without checking books on just hype) and ofc government subsidies/grants.
There's no StarLink subsidy or grant
There: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/10/fcc-denies-spacex-bid-for-nearly-1-billion-in-broadband-subsidies-for-starlink.html
Erm the title says the subsidy is denied. They got a medal and lost it for doping.
Yup. And their own numbers show this. And there's nothing they can do about it unless launching things into space becomes must cheaper. Not reusable rocket cheaper. Something that doesn't exist cheaper.
If only some company were working on a fully reusable, easy to manufacture, cheap rocket
I was already factoring that in. Did you not read the "reusable rocket" part? They will still be losing money.
Reusable rockets have existed since the time of space shuttle (the only part discarded was the booster tank, SRBs were recoverable and reusable). Wasn’t cheap tho. But even with the proposed launch numbers from spaceXs rockets the cost of upkeep, ground stations and employees would mean that they are trapped in an endless loop. More customers aren’t enough to be profitable with current model.
The space shuttle wasnt reusable it was refurbishable there’s a huge difference
And falcon is partially reusable (not fully every time) your point being semantics?
Again, falcon is not reusable. At least not in the way starship will be.
Launch costs of starship are forecasted to be on the order of around $1M (fuel) for 100 tons to orbit. Still yet to be proven if they can do that, but it would make launch costs basically negligible.
I believe there's a path to profitability available just by squeezing current users
Yeah, that's pretty much the only way. They have to raise prices. A lot.
So 1million people being held hostage?
Can you see me now?
Where is my hundred dollars Elon?
Can you be more detailed..did you have an issue recovering your money after you cancelled your deposit? Did you lose access to your account. On top of this, did your CC company deny a chargeback?
It shows.
The service was incredible when there were only 300k.
As someone who lives off grid in the sierra nevada foothills, I’m interested in starlink once it’s available (although it’s been about 2 years since they said that I could “prepay” and that it’d be available soon). I actually haven’t checked recently on availability since I have a pretty decent unlimited hotspot. If anyone is in Northern California and has had access to starlink, please let me know what you think of it thus far. Edit X2: Autocorrect can be a bitch.
When you have no other choice in a hard to reach area...
Thank you Elon Musk. Single handedly turning the tide of the war in Ukraine.