[portillo]

For the source, see [1]. "The coverage gap– those living outside of areas covered by mobile broadband networks4–continues to decrease below the 1 billion threshold and now stands at 750 million people. Since 2014 the gap has more than halved, from 24% to 10% of the global population." It's actually 90% covered by 3G and 4G.

Regarding the costs, I am not sure where your 60k/sat is coming form. Currently, launch costs for SpaceX are in the millions (60 commercially, let's say 30 millions cost), and they are launching 60 satellites at a time, so at least 500k/sat.

I am not sure that they will be able to cut the launch costs by a factor of 10, even considering resusability, larger launch capacity, etc, etc.

[1] https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads...

[caconym_]

It is completely clear where the 60k number is coming from. Whether you agree with it or not (he did qualify it as speculative) if you don't know where it came from then you must have replied to his post without actually reading it.

[portillo]

You are right, maybe I should have said where the sub-100$/kg comes from.

In the first Starlink launch, with 60 satellites of ~230 kg each, the cost of launch was ~$30M (considering that the "retail price" of a Falcon 9 launch is $60M, I guess that half the cost if a good assumption). Thus, the cost per kg was $30M / (60 * 230 kg) ~ $2,000/kg. I just don't see how they are going to achieve a x10 reduction in cost, even considering reusability, larger masses, etc, etc.

[caconym_]

Yeah, I guess we'll see. Economies of scale and complete many-times reusability of both stages sound like plausible multipliers to me, but it's all speculation until the thing flies a few times and they get a mature production line up and running.