[qayxc]

> I think Starlink is doing pretty good still.

Well, atm., yes. From the very beginning I thought that's it's a very risky idea to focus on end users, though. Ships, airplanes, mining operations, emergency services, etc. - that's where the real benefit and money is.

Ships have rates of up to $60k/mo for low bandwidth satellite internet. StarLink maritime is only $5k/mo and every maritime plan basically equates ~50 residential users in terms of turnover. Special deals with airlines, cruise ships and so forth could easily bring in as much money as tens of thousands of end-users - including much less hassle with regulators and billing.

The problem is that satellite internet (no matter if LEO or GEO) scales very poorly and creates an economic death spiral (hence the need for Starship) - more users means less available bandwidth, thus requires more satellites. More satellites require more rocket launches, which costs money and requires more users to pay for it, etc.

It remains to be seen whether the current path StarLink takes is sustainable from a business perspective. A 30k satellite constellation is certainly economically unsound using current rockets (e.g. Falcon 9), given that it took 3 years to get ~3300 into orbit and the average lifetime per Gen1 satellite is planned to be around 5 years.

This means 3300 Gen1 sats have to be replaced within the next 5 years while another 7500 or so have to be launched on top of that. With Gen2 sats being heavier, F9 can only take maybe 25 (this is a guess) instead of 50-60 sats per launch. That'd amount to about 87 F-9 launches per year just for StarLink and I don't think that's economically feasible (hence Starship). But we'll see.

[biomcgary]

I think you need to add US regulatory and political considerations when considering the liability of targeting consumers versus business. In the US, rural users are over-represented in congress and are by far the biggest beneficiaries of Starlink (vs other available options). In my area, I can only WFH because of Starlink, so you better be sure that I contact my swing state Representatives and Senators anytime I hear about something that might negatively impact Starlink service.

[ghaff]

Although it's reasonable to ask whether Starlink is charging enough. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that it comes from a privileged position to state that I'd pay a lot to be able to live with decent Internet access somewhere that I wouldn't otherwise be able to.

[biomcgary]

Personally, I'd be willing to pay more for Starlink, but that willingness is capped by the price of unlimited 4G plans in my area.

From a business perspective, I suspect that the number of potential consumers living (at the moment) in areas with wireless ISPs and no wired ISPs is quite a bit larger than than areas with no wireless ISP. However, with time, I suspect that WFH and Starlink will encourage some people to move farther out from current infrastructure and they will be almost entirely dependent on Starlink, since HughesNet and other geostationary satellite internet providers aren't really comparable in bandwidth or latency.

[sneak]

Musk has publicly stated that Starlink Gen2 hard-requires Starship.