[ceejayoz]

Satellite internet has indeed existed for decades, but via small numbers of geostationary satellites (Iridium only has 76 active satellites; Starlink launches about that many in every launch). That means severely constrained bandwidth, and high latency given the ~50,000 mile round trip the data has to take. It's also expensive to get a satellite out there.

Low Earth orbit constellations have both lower latency (a couple hundred miles for data to travel instead of tens of thousands) and dramatically more (and cheaper) satellites = more bandwidth available.

[shaklee3]

I'm well aware of the scale of starlink, but the speeds delivered by starlink won't be any faster than the existing GEO satellites at the time, not will it be cheaper. The OP talked about high speed internet, which, in most cases, the latency doesn't matter.

Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit. If you have a source that says otherwise, please post it here.

[ceejayoz]

Iridium currently offers a handful of megabits at best, doesn't it? Starlink's loading 20 Gbps on each satellite, and has successfully tested up to 610 megabits on a connection with a military plane. (https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...)

> Every cost estimate made by people in this industry say it will be much higher than geo to deliver a bit.

I'm not clear on whether you're referring to the ground station, the satellite constellation, or the cost of service here.

That said, industry laughed at the idea of reusable rockets, and Blackberry thought Steve Jobs faked the iPhone pre-release. Industry estimates have been known to be badly wrong.

[shaklee3]

The ground system is what will make or break starlink. Every phased array antenna to date is at a price point that would put starlink selling exclusively to enterprise customers. This means consumers won't be able to get it unless you're in the 1% and living very remote.

SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.

http://www.mit.edu/~portillo/files/Comparison-LEO-IAC-2018-s...

[ceejayoz]

OneWeb claims to have cracked that, for a price point of $200-300. https://spacenews.com/wyler-claims-breakthrough-in-low-cost-...

Even if it winds up being more expensive, you might see a neighborhood getting an antenna and distributing it to a group of houses.

> SpaceX will not realize 20Gbps per satellite in useable bandwidth. It's more like 5Gbps.

Based on guesses made prior to the first launch of production hardware, and speculative guesses on the number of SpaceX ground stations? Your slides are from 1 October 2018. The first batch of production hardware went up 24 May 2019.

[portillo]

I am the author of the slides/paper. The analysis was done with the best data available at the time, but I am interested in knowing what parameters you think are off / have changed substantially since then.

I can say that the mass and volume of the satellites has changed quite a lot, and therefore the number of rocket launches required is pretty off in the paper. But I have not seen much info to invalidate the rest of results.

[shaklee3]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the mass estimates increased? either way, that should only affect how many that can launch at a given time. I didn't think that number had changed appreciably either.

[shaklee3]

These are not guesses. These are calculations based on FCC filings with things like EIRP, PFD, etc, all included. SpaceX cannot simply transmit hotter than they filed for just because the filing is old.

If anything, they're worse than those calculations since there's no ISL, and there were reported propulsion system problems.

I personally can't see a neighborhood going in on satellite internet since they still need to transmit between each other, which would mean more equipment.

[ericd]

Can you point to some of those cost estimates?

Latency absolutely matters for "high speed internet". Once you have reasonable bandwidth, that's the dominant factor in the user experience.

[portillo]

NSR has some public estimates here: https://www.nsr.com/leo-survival-of-the-fittestor-the-smarte...

NSR estimates for SpaceX are higher than what SpaceX claims (Gwynne Shotwell just claimed some Morgan Stanley estimates of $1M launch + $1M to be way off [1]), but still, I wouldn't expect them to be able to launch the 4,409 satellites of their intial design for less than $10B. And it's not clear that they will be able to raise such amount of money without a clear path towards profitability.

I agree with the shaklee3, Tim's blog is very legit. As full disclosure, I am the first author of the MIT study he mentioned, and the more I look into LEO mega-constellations, the more skeptical I become.

[1] https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/11877454453611806...

[ericd]

Thanks! Why do you become more and more skeptical? Is there some fundamental reason they won't be competitive?

[shaklee3]

No, it's not. Streaming media is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth on the internet today. Latency doesn't matter at all for those.

Please see this blog for approximate cost estimates, or the MIT study comparing leo constellations.

http://tmfassociates.com/blog/category/operators/spacex/

[ceejayoz]

Streaming uses lots of bandwidth, but it's not necessarily the majority of browsing activity. High latency is painful if you're doing things like browsing Reddit.

The blog you're citing claimed Starlink was getting canceled a year ago, so I'm a bit skeptical of its use as an oracle.

http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2018/09/18/420000-km-funding-s...

> Another hint that Starlink is going away was the statement that BFR is expected to consume the majority of engineering resources after the commercial crew development has been completed for NASA next year, despite Starlink supposedly costing more to develop than BFR ($10B+ compared to ~$5B) over the next 5 years.

[shaklee3]

Browsing Reddit is perfectly fine on satellite internet. It's obviously not as fast as cable, but it's not the satellite internet of 10 years ago people judge it on.

TMF is probably the most accurate consultant in this industry if you read the whole blog. He tends to be opinionated, which you won't find on places like spacenews.

Either way, it's not productive arguing. It's like the Tesla versus anti-tesla camp, and that certainly won't be settled anytime soon.

[shaklee3]

I know this is coming in late, but TMF just did an analysis of the economics:

http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2019/12/12/reality-and-hype-in...