Yeah and there's already a lot of providers of satellite internet. But, Starlink has not published their pricing, so it's unclear how much of the market will they capture.
Sure, there are competitors. Starlink (or any other proposed LEO constellation) offers a fundamentally better product as a result of low latency (ballpark 640ms vs 20ms). Which they get as a result of being in low earth orbit instead of geosynchronous orbit. Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower, meaning the ability to out compete on price.
I don't see the existing constellations remaining competitive for long.
It's not true. LEO systems are far more CAPEX intensive than GEO, and neither Starlink, Oneweb, Telesat, or Kuiper will be cheaper than Viasat-3 and will not be able to compete in terms of cost per Gbps.
See the cost of phased array, which Leo needs to work. They're significantly more expensive than standard parabolic dishes, and there's no evidence SpaceX has changed that.
Based on Elon's standard playbook, I'm guessing he's going to try to bring down unit economics with much larger scale in phased array manufacturing than we've seen in the past. If he didn't think he could do this, I don't think they'd be launching Starlink.
That said, I know almost nothing about phased arrays, so I don't know if it's expensive due to some fundamental reason, or if it's partly because it's been a niche/low volume device before now.
Well, look at Oneweb as an example. They have raised 3+ billions, still need more funding and their total system throughout is not that much larger than Viasat-3's,which has a cost of ~1 billion (?). I don't think that Starlink is gonna be significantly (maybe a factor of 0.5x) cheaper in terms of cost per Mbps.
- Lack of concern over intentionally deorbitting satellites for testing and sending experimental prototypes to space with an apparently expected not negligible failure rate.
- Stated cost of the phased array groundstations (in the hundreds)
