[Fischgericht]

[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.]

And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.

On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.

Why is that? Simple maths.

Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.

So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.

"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"

While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.

But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.

Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.

You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.

[JumpCrisscross]

> "But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"

Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)

(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)

Was this AI generated?

> The cable itself costs virtually nothing

Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?

> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months

Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.

> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.

[Fischgericht]

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok?

Anyway, yes, I am a human.

And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...

v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

[wmf]

The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.

[Fischgericht]

Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.

[lxgr]

Inter-satellite links simply provide additional (time-variant) paths, which doesn't inherently relate to shared state.

You seem to be under the impression that inter-satellite links somehow imply a self-organizing mesh topology that preserves terminal-to-gateway associations at any cost (including that of extra in-space hops), but that does not necessarily follow from the existence of ISLs.

In other words, your observation of occasional routing instability causing higher-layer issues is perfectly compatible with working ISLs.

[Fischgericht]

Accepted.

[inemesitaffia]

Starlink switches beams every 15 seconds and satellites every 120 seconds.

You keep your sessions through both. Lasers or no lasers

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working

Imagine Amazon 10x'd its ingress/egress fees between regions.

[inemesitaffia]

You're not getting new sessions period.

[Fischgericht]

I will not disagree as I can not verify this claim. Have you tested it yourself or have a source which has some tech proof on that one?

[hughes]

Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?

[Fischgericht]

[Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.]

The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc.

But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself.

Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?

[lxgr]

You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense.

The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs.

It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.

[niwtsol]

Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working?

The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.

[Fischgericht]

Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_...

Have a look at the downtimes of the system.

A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.

[inemesitaffia]

This is ridiculous.

How's service delivered to the South Pole?

Iqaluit?

As long as your traffic is terminated at the same POP, you won't get any session terminations.

And Starlink tells you when your public IP changes anyway

[Fischgericht]

Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured.

How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias?

It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats.

And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer.

It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet).

If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover.

You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that!

So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. `

Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I believe that YOU are a bot

I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)

> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too

Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.

You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.

Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).

You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.

[Fischgericht]

Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :)

And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.

(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)

Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin...

These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".

And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)

Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.

So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers

Your revenue figures are consumer only. And while you're generous on utilization factor, we capitalised the TCO up front while amortising revenue, and then reduced asset tenure to worst case observed during development.

Flex up to 4 years, let $1mm TCO be paid up front and the rest amortised, and reduce utilisation to 80% ($80k/month revenue) and IRR shoots up to 73%. Take TCO to $3mm ($1mm up front, $2mm amortised), reduce utilisation to 75% and we're still over 20%.

> while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium

Well, yes. Starlink connections are more profitable and you can't scale selling internet to Belgium into a Starshield defence contract. Or selling to airlines and cruise ships and yachts and mining operations, all of which pay more than a Belgian.

> some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again

Starlink doesn't sense in densely-populated areas of the EU or Asia. (And the equivalent for SpaceX would be ridesharing Starlink on someone else's flight.)

> Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example

If you have the scale. You're underestimating the risk that comes from having to place infrastructure up front.

Your analysis is pretty solid. But I don't think it's taking into account the fact that you can build multibillion-dollar telecoms business on a few tens of millions of high-paying customers.

[Fischgericht]

I guess we can agree that the comparison between Sat internet and physical links depends a lot on the physical situation in the target region, and the regulatory frame work.

And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.

I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.

I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.

[stronglikedan]

> Was this AI generated?

It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.

[Fischgericht]

I find it even more crazy that you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human. :)

To be honest, while I took it lightly, others might feel pretty insulted by such claims. De-humanizing someone stinks.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human

I made this mistake, but I'll defend it by pointing out that I've gone a few comments deep on HN, thinking through and citing and engaging in good faith, only to realise I wasn't talking to a human but to a bot. (Then the commenter gets defensive about using a bot, hallucinations and all.)

Instead of taking it as a personal insult, maybe interpret it as your comment having inspired someone to engage effortfully with what you said.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>are funded with tax-payer money

This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.

>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?

>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber

[Fischgericht]

All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.

In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.

[BenjiWiebe]

True. And starlink is a way to bypass all your/my local regulatory hurdles. They had to deal with several very large regulatory hurdles, and then they're golden. No dealing with every little town separately.

[Fischgericht]

Not true really. You will hit regulatory hurdles if your rockets explode in other countries too often :)

And: RF spectrum is HIGHLY regulated.

Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.

Yes, you have read that correctly: 17 Billion for 300 MBit/s.

[lxgr]

So you're telling people to live with bad/no Internet connection now (due to local regulations) because of hypothetical future problems with their viable alternative in the future?

Easy advice to give from the outside, especially (presumably) from a place with great fiber options.

> Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.

That's L-band spectrum for direct-to-device services, which comes at a heavy premium due to its advantageous physical properties and inherent scarcity (the entire L-band has fewer Hz of spectrum than what Starlink alone is already using in the Ka band). Ka-band spectrum is much, much cheaper. You're comparing the cost of real estate for factory/campus on a green field hours away from everyone with that of a high street storefront.

[lxgr]

> The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky

You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.

And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).

> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.

How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?

> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?

And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.

> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.

Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.

[Fischgericht]

Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.

[lxgr]

> Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.

So there is demand :)

> As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time

Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part of some conspiracy? How else would SpaceX get away with claiming that they have global coverage?

> I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.

Installing a new satellite terminal on the outer hull of a commercial aircraft costs millions, including the lost time spent in the hangar, and that's to say nothing about all the required certifications.

That said, Hawaiian Airlines have been using it for a few months now. Seems to be working great, and their routes are also definitely not possible to cover from LEO without inter-satellite links.

[Fischgericht]

No conspiracy, but let's say that it is rather hard to get proper benchmarks done by actual users, and one has to rely on a lot of anecdotical data. Have you seen any real-life benchmark reports with traceroutes, measure downtime, handover time etc that impressed you in a positive way? If so, please share.

Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :)

It very well might be possible that the intra-links are only used for special customers like airlines for now, and not for consumers, and that this is the reason that all people I know who use Starlink still handover downtime...

[lxgr]

"Handover downtimes" for stationary or mobile users? If they're stationary, that's not something inter-satellite links are needed for or would help with.

[Fischgericht]

You are very wrong here:

Right now Starlink claims to be operating a mesh, but they are not. If they would want to build a mesh, Inter-sat links for NOT be used used to pipe through bandwidth to the "best" base station. It would be used for shared state to be able to prepare a handover. Synching state obviously is much easier and more stable if the neighboring sats can talk directly, instead of sharing it over their slow, high latency and lossy base stations.

See IEEE 802.11r for the equivalent for WiFi.

[inemesitaffia]

please talk to "panuvic".

pan &a@t& uvic.ca

I believe he's a University professor in Canada. Working on this data wrt OneWeb and Starlink.

[inemesitaffia]

United, Zipair, Hawaiian, Qatar.

The lasers work and I really don't know where you got the idea they don't.

They've worked since at least late 2022.

We're in 2025

[wmf]

Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.

[Fischgericht]

Gimme your source URL, please.

As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.

Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.

Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/starlink.com

At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?

[sib]

>> Also, have you actually used Starlink?

Yes, for example, via a battery-operated "Mini" terminal a month or so ago in extreme rural Finland, ~1km from the Russian border, while photographing wolves & bears.

It worked great.

[Fischgericht]

Mad respect!

[inemesitaffia]

Top ISP in USA

https://www.pcmag.com/articles/best-isps-2025

[JumpCrisscross]

> this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory

Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.

[TheAlchemist]

That's also my opinion - it will probably never be profitable - it's a great product, but the economics are not right - and that's why no other provider did this (even though they have the tech).

Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.

[JumpCrisscross]

> once the bubble pops

What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.

You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.

[TheAlchemist]

Sorry, I was referring to the general stock market (mostly AI) bubble.

As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.

[lxgr]

What does a stock market bubble have to do with the profitability (i.e. not the valuation) of any given company?

Are you arguing that the demand in Internet connectivity in rural/remote areas is somehow caused by an investment bubble as opposed to a long-term stable need?

[TheAlchemist]

No, I don't think there is any relationship there.

I'm saying that I highly doubt the real profitability of SpaceX / Starlink, and we will only see if it's really as good as they say, once the bubble pops and there is no inifinite capital, and maybe some accountability.

[inemesitaffia]

They aren't raising money.

What's there to pop?

[JumpCrisscross]

> for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts

SpaceX has audited financials. They're not published, but they leak a lot.

[TheAlchemist]

Yes, and Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information

SpaceX isn't leaking their own financials.