[fc417fc802]

> Comcast is one of the best-run ISPs

You mean the company with such a bad reputation that it had to aggressively rebrand? I take it you've never had the displeasure of doing business with them.

That said it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that it was one of the most profitable ISPs for investors. That would fit quite well with the general theme of prioritizing the interests of investors over all else.

[kube-system]

Comcast is a successful business in spite of their customer satisfaction. You don’t need to please your customers when when you can involuntarily extract their money anyway.

[Robotbeat]

Comcast is not a rapidly growing company, though.

This isn’t hypothetical. SpaceX is increasing Starlink revenue by like 50% per year. And their current Starlink constellation, about 10,000 satellites, has been launched entirely by Falcon 9. They’ve been waiting to launch much larger satellites on starship (in fact they had versions of these ready for several years now, and recently did suborbital tests of some of them on recent starship flights). Starship is about 5-10 times the capacity of Falcon 9, is fully reusable, & has larger diameter allowing much larger satellites. They asked for approval for roughly 40,000 of these larger satellites (~3 times the size of current ones, each about 10 times the bandwidth… and half of the 10,000 are even older designs), and they may eventually do about 100,000 of them & further increase the size and reduce latency (by operating at lower altitude). It’s not an exaggeration to say SpaceX intends to increase bandwidth by at least 100x, maybe a lot more. They intend to use a lot of this extra capacity to expand into mobile coverage as well. They are leveraging their platform for incredibly important national defense capabilities as well, and they operate as their own backhaul using on-board laser links. They can service anywhere in the world that will let them, including lucrative sectors like aviation. I do think it makes sense to value SpaceX as a rapidly growing business, not as a dividend-giving, plateaued ISP like Comcast.

This is all before even mentioning the idea of orbital datacenters.

[SkiFire13]

You're trying to justify SpaceX's valuation using Starlink, but it's clear from the S-1 that it makes up only for ~5% of SpaceX estimated TAM.

[Octoth0rpe]

Many people think their claimed TAM is total fiction, and attempting an actual realistic TAM relies far more heavily on starlink. From morningstar:

> Our base-case forecast entails $56 billion in revenue for Starlink in these niche and growth areas by 2035, representing about 45% of the identifiable market we’ve sized

source: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-what-investors-nee...

[SkiFire13]

> Many people think their claimed TAM is total fiction, and attempting an actual realistic TAM relies far more heavily on starlink.

Then either the TAM for Starlink is ~20x bigger than reported by SpaceX (I doubt they would downplay themselves in such a way) or the whole SpaceX TAM is ~5x smaller (much more realistic, if not more than that)

[Robotbeat]

I think the TAM for both is reasonable (it's just generic "Enterprise" stuff, at the end of the day), but I think Starlink is better able to capture a larger portion of its TAM.

[Slothrop99]

> aggressively rebrand

That had to be 20 years ago? Not that anyone likes the cable company.

As a comcast customer, their core internet service seems really solid. It comes in through some sketchy 1980s cables installed by some company who got bought by some company who got bought by Comcast. So occasionally a router in the back of a gas station blows up, the cable system wasn't exactly built to AT&T standards.

[fc417fc802]

> their core internet service seems really solid

If you ignore data caps the core service itself does seem to be much better these days than it was 10 let alone 25 years ago. But then again my sample set consists exclusively of locations where they have one or two FttH offerings as competition so it's not as though they could have remained in such markets without upgrading.

Somewhat tangentially I find it surprising how fast MoCA is when you consider the cables it runs on top of.

[overfeed]

> That would fit quite well with the general theme of prioritizing the interests of investors over all else.

It's not a "general theme", it's right there in the name of the economic system.

[runako]

Yes, my commentary was through the lens of an investor. Comcast does well for investors -> the multiples assigned to it by the market will be a good reference -> Starlink is not likely to have a terminal value anything like what boosters suggest.