[mnd999]

Puff piece. Starlink is fundamentally not about providing broadband to anyone. It’s landgrabbing a finite resource - low-earth orbit space - before it’s worth is recognised by those who should be regulating it.

The broadband itself might be nice or it might be awful. It doesn’t actually matter because that was never the point.

[zlynx]

It is about making money. Starlink is a money generating system that makes use of low cost launch made possible by SpaceX.

If it does use up most of the low orbit space it is because SpaceX is the only company that is even capable of launching that many satellites and making money on it. Until there is another challenger there is zero point in complaining, because competition is not even an option.

Since it is low orbit it is self limiting problem. Any low orbit satellite has a limited lifetime of a few years without power.

[Diederich]

> Starlink is fundamentally not about providing broadband to anyone.

This reply brought to you over a robust, fast, low latency and reliable Starlink connection.

[ctdonath]

And cheap. $99/mo for competitive data service literally anywhere is amazingly cheap.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Wait til you have 1000 neighbors vying for bandwidth.

[benlivengood]

The most pessimistic estimate I've seen paid for by the cable industry is here: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10208168836021/FBA_LEO_RDOF_Ass...

Only if each subscriber is using an average of 15-20 Mbps during peak times will about 50% of subscribers see some throttling.

Interestingly they only showed a single graph of average bandwidth over time from a cable company to estimate needs for SpaceX. No clue if they actually separated it out by time zone for each coverage area in their actual analysis.

[Diederich]

Starlink isn't about directly competing against high density fiber connected internet. It's about everyone else.

[ctdonath]

Right, it's not about taking a major share & expansion of a trillion-dollar industry with payout starting immediately, it's about staking out a thin fraction of (literally) empty space and waiting decades for others to start needing small portions of it.

Because $99/month * 12 months * 10 years * 1,000,000,000 customers = $11.88T isn't the point to a man who literally needs a trillion dollars to pull off the grandest mega-project ever.

[cryptonector]

It's not clear what you're saying. Are you saying that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource? Or something else?

Anyways, I don't buy that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource. Even if it were so, what would be a fair way to share that resource, and who even with?! There's only one announced competitor to Starlink at this time, and they're not even remotely close to being operational. What makes SpaceX able to put up Starlink at such low cost (compared to its earning potential) is that SpaceX has lowered launch costs for itself (and others) by a lot, and they're working to lower those costs even more. What is "fair" when a company works so hard to lower costs and increase availability? Is it to punish them so others get a chance to compete at higher costs??

[ctdonath]

Sorry about the mess, that comment was dripping with sarcasm.

1. There's a lot of room up there, and actually claiming & using it is a normal process for civilizing frontiers.

1b. Handwaving about "underappreciated precious resources" is a waste of opportunity. I get the sentiment, but belongs in the 3rd part of the aphorism "lead, follow, or get out of the way."

2. Saying "SpaceX isn't in it for the money" is ridiculous, considering they could gross >$10T in the next decade with it, at ridiculously low expenditure.

2b. In that timeframe, other businesses would be just barely starting to seek out a small fraction of that "precious resource".

[ctdonath]

Additional napkin math:

If we’re going to take the “precious resource” argument seriously, let’s. One Starlink satellite can earn ~$25M/year, setting the value of that slot. This seems a reasonable value for LEO “homesteading”; if someone wants it, that’s a fair price to pay. And I do mean fair, seeing as it’s SpaceX inventing the technology, building the satellites, staking claims, and otherwise being first-mover and pioneer of LEO on a colonizing scale (so to speak). That includes the value of serving 25,000 people per satellite at $100/month. Want that orbital property? pay the trailblazer that made that parcel valuable. (As for “Earth’s population has a fair share” - no, they didn’t do squat for it beyond what one was already paid for to get SX there. Anyone is free to go there now and lay claim. Government involvement should be nothing more than collecting cost of tracking claims and resolving disputes.)

[giantrobot]

The whole "orbital slot" thing is absurd. Space is really big. Like, really big. And orbital mechanics being what it is, you could launch a satellite in the exact same orbit as a Starlink satellite but trailing a few miles behind and they'll never impact one another. If they are using totally different uplink and downlink frequencies they'll be effectively invisible to ground stations of competing services.

That being said, your napkin math is a bit off. A single Starlink satellite isn't all that valuable. It can only talk to ground stations in some region on Earth for a short period of time. It's the dozens of satellites per plane that make the service useful (24/7 coverage). While you can divide total revenue by the number of satellites, the service only works with a complete orbital plane.

[ctdonath]

Agreed. It was an attempt to take the issue as raised and see what the consequential ballpark numbers are.

[cryptonector]

Thank you!

[wmf]

I guess orbital space could be auctioned instead of homesteaded but SpaceX could probably afford to outbid Kepler and OneWeb anyway.

[cryptonector]

Then we get to argue whether they'd pay the U.S., the UN, or... some other entity. Naturally the U.S. gets to tax space access by U.S. businesses, but let's not kid ourselves, it'd be just a tax and wouldn't benefit the public consumer of space-based networking nor SpaceX's competitors. An auction would be a lot like a tax where you can lose the opportunity, and where the tax can be upbid a great deal.

No, sorry, I think as long as SpaceX continues to work to lower costs and increase access then to get in their way would be a terrible mistake.

[wmf]

So what is the high-value use of low-earth orbit other than broadband and why doesn't SpaceX do that directly?

[admissionsguy]

Is it scarce, though? Couldn't you put more constellations at the same orbits +/- a couple of kms? In any case, I would expect the spectrum rights to be much scarcer than the space, and they are well regulated.

[cryptonector]

Exactly, spectrum is the scarce resource here, and it already is regulated. There is no need for additional regulation regarding that, and there already is regulation of orbits between FCC and FAA.

[generalizations]

It's a cynical perspective, but the downvotes are unwarranted. It's worth comparing to McDonalds, where a large proportion of the corporation's worth is in the real estate they hold.

[lucb1e]

Okay but it's not as if mcdonald's bought the land under false pretenses and now uses it for any purpose since it's theirs. Claiming that the internet access is just a pretense for "land" grabbing when the company neither owns the space afterwards nor can switch businesses to something more nefarious and lucrative with the existing devices... it makes no sense.

[3gg]

Don't know about your specific claims, but I also had the same reaction.

"This is the world SpaceX’s Starlink program, which has set a goal to provide high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable."

Can we be honest for once and be up-front about a corporation's real goals? As if <insert technology here> was going to do anything about the gaping inequality and other social problems that actually matter to people. That your comment gets down-voted is certainly telling about the audience here.

[jsharf]

The alternative is waiting literally 10-20 years for anyone else to catch up.

[cryptonector]

Or, hey! slow SpaceX down with regulation!1!!

[bcrl]

Who is even trying to catch up at this point?