[stevep98]

Global cellular operator revenue is approx $1T. They have put their toe in the water with direct-to-cellular support for starlink, and have bought spectrum to improve this. I'm sure they basically want to offer cellular to everyone in the world and get a good chunk of that $1T. Maybe they want 20% of it? Sounds crazy, but China Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom each have 10%. Sounds it's not so wild that they can grab a big chunk, especially if they can find new customers that are not already connected.

And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.

I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

How would people be able to use internet when they are inside? Perhaps under layers and layers of concrete, think a 50 stories building

[inemesitaffia]

The same way they already do with DAS and WiFi routers

[JumpinJack_Cash]

So that's a no.

Phone > Satellite connection cannot happen indoors directly, whereas 3-4-5g can, today, not 10 years and billions of R&D into the future

[inemesitaffia]

It's a no in the sense that these buildings already have poor/no service today.

[jraby3]

This is the right answer. They are building their own cell phone network to compete with major carriers worldwide.

[pyrale]

> to compete with major carriers worldwide.

I don't see a reason why countries with existing carriers would allow that, given the owner's stance about political meddling.

[Lomlioto]

No they sell a story to investors.

Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.

And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.

With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.

[rsynnott]

It’s a pretty low margin business, tho, generally.

[Lomlioto]

It will take years if not more to be technical capable to have modems so good that they can communicate with a starlink satelite in any reasonable 'day to day' way.

And Starlink already increased prices again.

And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.

Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.