[mrkstu]

Note that the cost of an MX2020 likely exceeds Starlink's cost of building and launching one of their satellites.

Now there is likely to be an relatively few MX2020s in a mid-size carrier (conceding that Starlink will be launching many more satellites) but Starlink has essentially 0 cost infrastructure for last mile deployment other than the satellites themselves.

But lets say Starlink gets to your upper limit of customers (which I assume they will, eventually, assuming they aren't already up against a Shannon limit on their bandwidth,) that is a billion dollars a month at $100 vs ~1.2 billion in launch revenues total in 2020, not even counting high revenue customers like the Department of Defense.

This is going to be a money printing machine for SpaceX once their main cost is just replacing deorbiting satellites and bandwidth on the ground.

[ixfo]

Sure those big routers are costly but they're maybe the cost of a dozen satellites and serve half the total constellation size. Buried infrastructure has a 20-30 year guaranteed lifespan if built with fibre. Routers tend to last 10 years minimum. The opex cost of constantly replacing satellites is going to be pretty substantial.

Also Starlink doesn't have last mile costs as such (they just push that to the consumer) but they do have ground station requirements which will grow linearly with demand. It'll be interesting to see how they manage that as they grow. And of course, they're going to need those big routers too...

[mrkstu]

Will any one ground link station actually require the big routers though? The traffic will be distributed through each connection point to possibly push the throughput per ground station to a lower level of cost hardware.