Exactly my point. So, it will always be limited in market size and hence it may be a gamechanger for a subset of the use-cases, such as the ones I mentioned, but not from an financial standpoint.
With coax it depends on how it's set up. Plenty of existing lines have worse upload speed than starlink because of frequency allocations that are expensive to change.
Phone wires are very bad at carrying data and are usually much slower than starlink.
Assuming only 25% of Americans currently without high-speed internet will opt for Starlink, not counting world-wide users, not counting commercial applications (boats, planes, gas stations), not counting using Starlink as internet backbone (i.e. alternative to under sea fiber).
Most likely Starlink will be a cash cow (and finance Mars colonization).
2.5 people per household. So 7.5% of 42 million people would be 1.3M households. The current price is $1.3k a year, so that's $1.7B of service revenue just from the US. And there are more households that are interested even if they have "high speed" service already. So even with those numbers it looks pretty good.
I was excited about it also, until I looked into it deeper. It is internet service of last resort. I would default to Hughesnet or skyblue first if I didn't have access to DSL, fiber or cable.
This has me intrigued, why? Hughesnet has ludicrously low data caps.
(Asking as someone that fits your description. DSL is offered where I live, at 3mbps. :( Cable/fiber are offered if I want to shell a quarter million to help them build their infrastructure... so no.)
By Musk's own admission, it can never be competitive against the cellular providers - they have the advantage in simple radio/physics terms over satellites.
I have some doubts - 4G/5G access is more and more prevalent throughout the US, and it provides better speeds and lower latency for less cost. T-Mobile's latest "home broadband" router that has an integrated 5G modem is surprisingly fast and affordable now, as one example. Starlink simply can't compete there, ever, seemingly. Cellular coverage grows and grows. Maybe there truly are enough customers cellular will never reach to justify low cost satellite internet? I have no doubts a market exists for expensive satellite internet for those that really need it. I pulled 600mbps over the air the other day on a Verizon 5G connection, just sitting in a store in a small town.
There is absolutely a risk Starlink will be an amazing technical invention, but not one enough people actually need to buy to justify continuing an affordable service. I think even owning a 2nd internet connection outside of your devices could become weird in the future - who wants wifi if the device can just have connectivity embedded from the factory, skipping wifi, routers and broadband connections altogether unless you want them? Smartphones and watches have already ditched the physical sim cards...
The metro/urban bias on HN is rarely more prevalent than when the subject is cars or Internet access.
I live on a wooded lot in a reasonably developed area in Ohio. DSL was brought out to my address in ~2004. Today it is limited to 15Mbps down, 768kbps up. 4G has been available since Verizon rolled it out in the area. I have no idea how long ago that was, maybe ten years ago. Today it's good for 25Mbps/2Mbps on a good day, no carrier on bad. I've had Starlink since Feb of 2021. Around November of last year it had become reliable enough that I could use it as my primary Internet access method. The numbers vary, but I would say my average is 140Mbps down and 25Mbps up.
So in my specific case, Starlink is the best Internet access, hands down. It has the lowest latency, it has the highest raw and average performance, and it is the most reliable. It has been this way for approximately a year. So in circumstances where the customer is anywhere outside of a urban/suburban area, Starlink is incredibly competitive and may in fact be the best option available.
I totally agree with you! But thanks for accusing me of bias anyway.
The only question I ask is, "is there a sustainable market for affordable satellite internet access?". There is no debate it is the best connection for some people right now, but if it is unsustainable that's good for no one in long term. Before Starlink, satellite internet was far more expensive.
Yet to turn a profit, and some big headwinds in way of competitive pressures from other cheaper technologies.
I am also a Starlink customer and live in the middle of nowhere, so... For the little my example is worth as well, I haven't seen anything like as good as those speeds where I am in Washington State, for some time. Over the same period, cellular has appeared in places it wasn't before.
Cellular doesn't need to reach everyone to be big enough to end the dream of affordable satellite access, and the cellular providers fight for the same government money many countries provide to improve connections for the most poorly connected regions. Assuming you are free of trees (a big problem!), Starlink so far only works well at really low density deployments - a huge detractor in many assessments comparing it to cellular deployments, even in remote regions.
Leaked slide deck from company declared optimum deployments is 100 customers per 300km squared, their "100 per 300 rule". Maybe this is better today and gets better with time, but cellular has a lot of radio advantages and a lot of existing infra to expand from. Also doesn't need spaceships.
> I totally agree with you! But thanks for accusing me of bias anyway.
Well your first line was "By Musk's own admission, it can never be competitive against the cellular providers" and then the rebuttal was based around a strong example of it beating cellular providers inside their coverage range.
Not really? How are you going to be competitive with the cellular companies by selling something to what reflects a very small percentage of their customer base?
> How are you going to be competitive with the cellular companies by selling something to what reflects a very small percentage of their customer base?
If you want to make facetious arguments, starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites, thousands of launches to install and ultimately maintain, plus a fleet of space ships”… I’m being charitable and not mentioning that each of those potential 42,000 needs replacing on a 5 year cycle - they don’t just go up there and stay there forever.
5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable - the USA already has a huge percentage of the population covered today - and has nice benefit of being an already profitable business to be in, and construction can be done by anyone with hands, tools and a vehicle. The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Emphasis on up to. They only have 3000 right now and it already works. If they go above 5000 it's because they think they will make more money that way, not because they need more than 5000.
> 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable
The US has hundreds of thousands of towers, and that number gets a lot bigger with 5G.
And while that covers "a huge percentage of the population", not all of that is fast, and reaching the rest of the population gets harder and harder.
> replacing on a 5 year cycle
> The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Let's say a cell tower lasts 20 years, which is a bit longer than two cell technology generations. So that means starlink needs to launch about a thousand satellites per year to maintain their network over the whole planet. And cell providers need to rebuild 20 thousand cell sites per year just in the US, more if they try to cover everyone.
Starlink can launch that many satellites with about $300M. Let's round way up to $500M a year to keep satellites and base stations running.
Each year cell companies are pulling in hundreds of billions and putting tens of billions into towers, just in the US.
Significantly less money to be made, and even more significantly less cost per square mile of coverage. Especially when a lot of that coverage range for towers can't do tens of megabits per second.
