[ACCount37]

The issue with terrestrial wireless links is that you just aren't going to cover every inch of Earth's surface with terrestrial wireless links.

At the same time: coverage comes cheap to Starlink. Which makes it perfect for serving areas no one wants to serve. Such as rural areas, anything outside the largest cities in underdeveloped countries, the open ocean, and so it goes.

[Zigurd]

Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient and shrinking TAM. The only places a terrestrial wireless provider doesn't want to serve are places that can't afford FWA even though it costs less.

[stinkbeetle]

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient [TAM]

Insufficient for what?

> and shrinking TAM.

Starlink has made quite an impact on planning around servicing commercially non-viable or marginal customers in government and telcos where I am from. It is IMO quite likely that some existing cell towers in remote areas that are very expensive to operate and maintain will eventually be shut down. So that could actually expand the "TAM".

> The only places a terrestrial wireless provider doesn't want to serve are places that can't afford FWA even though it costs less.

No, they also don't want to serve places where it costs more.

[Zigurd]

Satellites that last 5 years and have un-transparent launch economics are very unlikely to win on cost in any land-based market. If the market is too small or too poor to support FWA, it's not going to contribute significant revenue to Starlink.

Starlink needs tens of millions of subscribers to be valued like a telco.

[robocat]

The US military wants to have option to deploy anywhere in the world, so they also want to have comms everywhere.

The starlink network surely has special features to support US military needs (resiliance, encryption, blocking enemy countries from access, robustness against countermeasures, yaddayadda).

[Zigurd]

The military has interoperating and compatible comms everywhere. People have solved many problems before Elon invented a thing.

[ggreer]

5G fixed wireless makes sense in urban and suburban areas because a single tower can serve many customers. But in rural areas, the number of customers per tower is much lower. To be profitable, the cost to build & maintain the tower must be covered by the customers in the area. Google says a 5G tower can cost anywhere from $150k-$300k, with maintenance costs being around 10% of that per year. In rural areas, the cost is likely on the high end because power and fiber lines will be longer. Each 5G tower has a range of 5ish miles, meaning it can serve an area of 75-80 square miles. A rural county like Ferry County, Washington has 2 households per square mile. So in that county, a tower can serve 150-160 households. Assuming 100% of households are customers, that means each must pay $200-400 per year for the tower to break even after a decade. The actual numbers are fuzzier. Obviously you won't have 100% adoption, but cell towers also serve cell phones.

In comparison, each Starlink satellite costs around $1 million to manufacture and launch, and each satellite lasts at least 5 years. So cost per satellite per year is $200k. They currently have 7,600 satellites serving 7 million customers, meaning on average, each satellite serves almost 1,000 customers. At $200k per satellite per year, each customer needs to pay $200 per year for them to break even. It seems likely that launch costs will go down in the future, meaning this number will decrease.

There's also the complication that each new Starlink satellite improves coverage & bandwidth for the entire globe, while each new 5G tower improves coverage & bandwidth in a specific area. A county may have a population density of 2-4 households per square mile, but many of those households are clustered together. The less dense areas are not likely to be covered by cell towers any time soon, as it's less economically viable. Another disadvantage of cell towers is service failures. A single Starlink satellite failure means a slight degradation of service, while a single cell tower failure means everyone in the region is taken offline. In areas where both services are available, people would be likely to prefer the more reliable option.

[robotresearcher]

Also where terrestrial access is denied by the local government or infra has been disabled or destroyed.

I hope Starlink can maintain enough regular non-crisis subscribers to subsidize this incredibly helpful use case.

Perhaps governments could/do pay a retainer to keep this option alive.

[jdonaldson]

I'm quite sure that's what's already going on. LEO is big and empty and pretty boring, but it's also resilient to increasing trends of natural disaster, war, and civil unrest. Having a foothold there matters more and more every day.

[oceanplexian]

Once you cross a certain threshold Starlink is superior to fiber optics. That's because it has the potential to be both lower latency and more direct than terrestrial fiber as the speed of light is faster in the vacuum of space.

At a certain scale you're going to have to make the argument that laying a 10,000KM glass fiber across the ocean for 10-20% more latency is a better value than beaming it around in LEO.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient and shrinking TAM

Planes; yachts; cruise ships; naval vessels; sea-based drilling, mining and research platforms; mines in the middle of nowhere are a shrinking TAM?

You may also be underestimating how many large rural landowners don't want to give telcos (and the relevant authorities) access to any of their land.

[fragmede]

The two places that I'm fairly confident will never get covered by terrestrial wireless are the Pacific ocean and Atlantic ocean. Whether yacht owners, cruise ships, and airplanes are enough to sustain the business by some future time when terrestrial customers churn, who knows, but those customers aren't going to go away any time soon.

[pavel_lishin]

> Places only Starllink can reach are an insufficient and shrinking TAM.

And yet, people live in those places, and you telling them that they're not economically worth serving isn't really solving their problem.

[lokar]

Pretending that they are worth economically serving with current tech or even tech that could be available soon does not help them either.

[pavel_lishin]

Who's pretending? If they're getting internet through Starlink, it sure sounds like they're being served.

[hylaride]

For Starlink, maybe. However, I'm sure nuclear submarines operating in the arctic (and the US Navy in general) as well as forward operating US bases, would love and be willing to pay for Starshield to cover everywhere.

[boringg]

Pretty sure they don't have any comms signals and wouldn't connect to that unless absolutely necessary emergent situation. I thought they operate in the dark.

[dylan604]

Subs do pop up to make status reports or check-ins. They do operate independently in that command knows what area they patrolling but not exact locations at any given time.

[anonymousiam]

Subs (at least the US ones) also use "strategic" LPI/LPD milsat comms instead of commercial satcom. You don't want your enemy to geolocate your sub fleet whenever they phone home.

[Incipient]

Starlink has plenty of good use cases: - camper van coverage across whole countries/continents - rural farms/communities - global coverage for convenience (eg business travellers) - huge military use

...just depends if it's economically viable

[greenavocado]

Until the next war

[irjustin]

Planes boats etc