Physics dictates the opposite. High-value customers demand a high level of service, but only operate in relatively small locales. Starlink will scale their service to accommodate these customers.
But you can’t just deploy satellites in some areas and not others. For some latitude, if there are enough satellites per square mile to handle the needs of a cruise ship, then a rural customer is going to get great service due to the same satellite density.
ADF complains that X/Twitter’s policies don’t ban antisemites as long as they stay within the law, though they do reduce the spread of their posts.
Left-wing response: Musk is a raging antisemite!
I mean dang, there’s plenty of room to complain about X/Twitter, and lots of room for discussion about what freedom of speech means on social media, but there’s zero evidence of that correlation.
Elon Musk bad. I get it.
I have no problem trusting that Starlink will remain running and will be upgraded accordingly. No one is going to spend many billions putting up a satellite constellation then shut it down because ‘Jews’, however that’s supposed to work.
There’s a much greater chance that our government will simply make Starlink illegal, because they are working hard to control speech on the internet and push Canadians to watch Canadian programming. Unless Musk agrees to modify the service to suit Canada’s censorious politicians, they may just demand he block it in Canada.
I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s far more likely than Elon deciding to play games with a system he’s been focusing his company on creating for years on which he relies to help,fund his Mars dream.
I think it’s kinda silly to worry about Canada doing anything, but more generally, the response is going to be: it depends on the balance of power.
We can see a clear example of this already (and not in Ukraine!). Starlink is enabled in Iran, against the wishes of their leadership, but with the blessings of the US State Department. Good. As Musk said once, if they’re unhappy about it, they can shake their fists at the sky.
But the Chinese are not so lucky. There’s no US sanctioning to enable service, of course. And, well, it is a bit of a conflict of interest that Tesla has a big factory there. It’s not exactly a mark against Starlink since no one else is providing satellite service there, but if Chinese dissidents want what the Iranians have… well, they’re outta luck. Sorry, but China has a lot more pull than Iran does in every arena (including a space program capable of anti-satellite weapons).
Said another way, Musk will do whatever Musk wants, for whatever reasons Musk wants.
There are two entities that can influence him: countries whose business relationships across his whole business portfolio he values enough to matter, e.g. China, and the USA which can crush him and all his companies if they put their mind to it.
Beyond those two he’s a law unto himself controlling what may well be as big a “utility” as is facebook or much of the rest of the internet. While utterly wasted on drugs. Boy do we have a nice civilization goin’ on.
If only the big automakers hadn’t lied for decades about climate change and embraced EVs as early as they could. If only the big aerospace companies hadn’t had such an incestuous relationship with the military-industrial complex that it became impossible for them to produce cost-effective hardware, even when they wanted to. If only the Space Shuttle hadn’t been such a disaster that it convinced 99% of the industry that reusability was an impossible dream. If only the previous attempts at LEO internet were so incompetent that they sent the companies into bankruptcy, again convincing 99% of the industry that the whole thing was hopeless. If only…
Musk does mot have unlimited power, even within his companies. He has a lot of private investors he has to deal with, he has high-level employees that won’t tolerate stupid shenanigans, and Tesla is public so he is VERY limited in what he can do there.
SpaceX is not a public company, and right now he is burning a lot of private capital on Starlink and Starship. And he relies on government contracts just as the government relies on Elon. He plans on taking Starlink public once the constellation is complete, which implies all the proper accounting and fiduciary standards are met. He won’t be able to shut off Starlink on a whim.
His antics at Twitter show no sign of affecting his behaviour at his other compamies, which appear to be excellently run. And the jury is still out on Twitter.
I hope so. But the Liberals aren’t backing down on C-18, even though Meta is refusing to budge and has blocked Canadian news in Canada, and the media outlets in Canada are hurting from loss of links and from the loss of the deals they had already cut with Meta and Google. They are also going full steam ahead with C-11.
If Elon tells them to pound sand and leaves Starlink un-geofenced in Canada, they could always make the terminals illegal.
Again, I don’t think this is likely. It’s just more likely than Elon killing his trillion dollar satellite network because of some hissy fit.
I have never quite understood the economic motive behind starlink or similar projects?
Where is the ROI? Much of the world is already connected by fiber optic cables. Certainly all the developed countries, where there are customers who will pay for the service.
Fiber trenching is expensive. There’s a certain population density under which it’s cheaper to launch satellites than it is to run fiber to everyone. Especially if you have the lowest launch costs around and have fully internalized the idea of trading mass for cost in your construction. There are plenty of people in these conditions. Not the majority, mind you, but again the total market is $1.3T. So you don’t have to capture much for a decent business.
And, frankly, most ISPs are utter shite. I’m in Silicon Valley in a high density condo complex and I can’t get fiber. I can get cable, which is sorta good enough, but the idea that fiber is easily accessible in most areas is not right.
Starlink is much better than nothing, as well as geostationary satellite internet, but it’s also better than typical ground wireless (5G or otherwise) and rural DSL.
And again, there are the lucrative military and commercial customers.
I think you have put your finger on it right there.
You can’t ignore either market. The residential customers come for free, in effect, because the satellites spread out fairly evenly. Serve one market and get both. It’s also why they can charge such low prices in some areas (I think it’s <$50/mo in some places). Those customers aren’t really paying for their share of the constellation, but it doesn’t matter–it doesn’t cost anything extra to serve them.
Starlink in airplanes and on cruise ships will be very lucrative. A nuge and high-paying market is high speed trading. Starlink 2.0 is the absolute fastest way to get trading information across the world. When milliseconds count, Starlink will be worth a fortune to foreign trading houses.
Then there are the billions of people around the world without internet access, or with lousy access through their cell phones. Starlink will bring high-speed internet to villages and individuals without having to first build a gigantic infrastructure on the ground.
not even the guy who bought Twitter for $44.000.000.000 b/c he couldnt keep his mouth shut and in an unprecidented series of well documented “hip-shots, quick fixes and sounds-like-fun ideas” flushed half of its value down the drain (while blaming others) ???
Admittedly neither scenario makes ANY sense, but one of it is a reality.
sorry, but have you been living under a rock for the past 18 months? … He does what he wants, firing 1000s while stifling them for their severence pay, not paying rent and suppliers … changing its company’s name, b/c reasons, setting up a huge X on the roof (secured with sandbags) while ignoring authority’s demand to take it down, not allowing inspectors in …
that is the very contrary of your claim
How does what he’s doing at Twitter have anything to do with what I said about Tesla?
who calls the shots at Twitter?
who calls the shots at Tesla?
(see where this is going???)
All the current valuations of Twitter are made-up nonsense. They’re a private company. Even when private companies do funding rounds, it’s questionable relating those valuations to the actual value of a company, but Twitter doesn’t even have that currently. And even more inane is to compare that made-up number to the purchase price of a company, which almost by definition is the highest price that anyone would consider paying for it.
Regardless, Starlink has from the beginning been intended to be the way SpaceX starts making real money. It’s not some political statement. It’s already profitable in its very early stages, which is a good sign for later, when they’re just in maintenance mode and don’t need to expand the constellation. No one’s killing that goose.
Do you know the difference between a public compamy and a private one?
I do, does Musk?
Another upcoming revenue source for Starlink:
Texting and other low-bandwidth applications, using your existing cell phone, anywhere on the planet. They announced this a while back, but it looks like it’s actually coming soon now.
It will require some extra antennas on their satellites (probably already being launched), but aside from that just piggybacks on the existing platform. It’s a trivial amount of bandwidth compared to what they’re already carrying, so the existing laser links, etc. will have no problem with this data.
It’s all about getting maximum utility from one piece of infrastructure.
Maintenance mode means launching 2,400 satellites a year - almost half of what they’ve launched in the past 4 years total. They’re going to have to up the pace dramatically and every sat (build+launch+control) is going to have to have a sub 5-year ROI or their model doesn’t work.