When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.<p>While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.<p>However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.<p>India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network</a><p>In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: <a href="https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2025" rel="nofollow">https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...</a><p>See India in this 5G global coverage map: <a href="https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026" rel="nofollow">https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026</a><p>The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, <i>and</i> can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).
> The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small<p>People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.
> would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.<p>People vastly underestimate the subjective importance of the Internet for people. 10-20% of the total income seems like a very realistic figure, even if it means spending some days hungry.
When I was a teenager in early post-Communist Czechia, Internet connection was also expensive. So what we did was that we pooled resources. Five or ten households had a common connection and shared it.<p>I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.<p>BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year.
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.<p>And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.<p>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.
It’s a pretty low margin business, tho, generally.
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.<p>And Starlink already increased prices again.<p>And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.<p>Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.
How would people be able to use internet when they are inside? Perhaps under layers and layers of concrete, think a 50 stories building
This is the right answer. They are building their own cell phone network to compete with major carriers worldwide.
No they sell a story to investors.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Starlink is currently partnering with United Airlines for Wi-Fi coverage, so that's one thing.
Additionally, India is currently banning starlink for national security reasons.
Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.<p>And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.
For context, that revenue was $18.67 billion in 2025, with a net loss of $4.94 billion.<p>And we must remember that 6G is in the final stages of development, which has peak speeds of 1 Tbps.
6G will have worse physical penetration than 5G, which makes it worthless in rural areas where 5G is already severely inhibited by tree leaves.
It's not that simple. Yes, newer standards push for higher frequencies to get more bandwidth, but 5G for example also uses the old sub GHz bands with excellent range and penetration.
> in rural areas where 5G is already severely inhibited by tree leaves.<p>This is not a problem in Africa and India.
You need an /s or a /jk or people will take you seriously.<p><a href="https://www.google.de/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.2745409,36.8028116,3a,75y,145.58h,92.31t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sQBulD_Hw2fgAESsTmdi-KQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.3111237906325073%26panoid%3DQBulD_Hw2fgAESsTmdi-KQ%26yaw%3D145.58426652960952!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x182f1172d84d49a7:0xf7cf0254b297924c!8m2!3d-1.2920659!4d36.8219462!16zL20vMDVkNDk!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDcwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.de/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.2745409,...</a>
Starlink by itself does not have a net loss.
Starlink made a $4 bn profit last year, and is apparently growing 30% YoY.
Yeah but it doesn't become a Trillion dollar business if they don't solve the Starlink Satelite v3 issue.<p>They need Starship to be able to send v3 up, without v3 it doesn't scale well enough.<p>Starship still hasn't proven it can actually bring up the relevant payload high enough and they need it to be reusable otherwise costs will increase.<p>And they already exist and only have 10 Million customers. They need to get countries on their side like India but these countries are not stupid. Elon Musk showed them very clearly what he can do like his statements he did when Ukraine war started.
Will sending bits to space and back really be faster than fiber? How?
Lightspeed in air is close to c_vacuum. Light speed in fiber is roughly 2/3 c_vacuum. So for transatlantic it might be faster.
You need to take error into account, too. Can atmospheric conditions corrupt the transmission (this is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know)? If so then your latency and bandwidth will both suffer.<p>EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.
Unless you're trying to do something like high frequency stock trading, this does not really matter. Most of the added latency is added in the hops themselves, as packets are being classified and routed. Your generic Internet user won't be able to see any difference.
Often the bigger difference is just that fiber never goes in a straight line, even if it’s going to the right city. All that pesky geography gets in the way and makes the path longer.
Let’s see if we can bring the cost of hollow core fiber down, it would be faster transatlantic even
It will definitely be faster when someone drops an anchor on the undersea cable.
With positive thinking and maximum upside ?
We’ll how that prediction turns out…<p>My informed opinion says that you are wildly wrong.<p>(Also don’t forget the Starlink related military contracts that SpaceX has.)
> My informed opinion<p>Well, my informed (I guess? it's first hand) opinion says exactly what the PC said. And no the plan has been underfoot for so long that it really pretty much has nothing to do with the current regime even though I am sure like any regime they'd say they did it from the scratch.<p>I'd say we are getting really great at getting broadband to everyone than giving enough bread and education and healthcare to everyone :D (ignore the smiley, this sucks)
We already have Starlink. Starlink only has 10 Million customers.<p>Starlink increased prices just a fwe weeks ago.<p>So whats stoping the future starlink explosion?
Automated cargo ships. Traveling to automated ports.
The 5 wage slaves on current ocean giants aren't even a rounding error on any calculation.
Crews on those ships are spending nearly all their time maintaining them.<p>Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots
Never going to happen in your lifetime.<p>Salt water, is nasty, it gets everywhere, the environment on boats is damp. Ships are complicated and require constant effort to keep running.<p>Any sort of "automation" you build in is subject to those same environmental conditions, and wont last long.
This idea that putting $500m+ of assets in the water, but thinking that even one person on the boat is too many has got to be one of the silliest things in modern capitalism (obviously the crown goes to orbital AI data centers).<p>The same bosses will pay multiple security guards, in addition to staff, to guard <$10m in goods at a Walmart. But when 50x the goods are in the ocean, suddenly the staff is the limiter?
Space Bears have been saying this for quite a while, we live in megalopolis which already are covered very efficiently and we are only becoming more urban. Of course their voice was drowned because rockets are essentially giant penises piercing the atmosphere and hence the intersection of nerds getting excited for the sake of technical prowness and rich guys who don't get laid who seem to be nowadays at the helm of the intelligentia didn't want to hear none of that.<p>On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.<p>At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.<p>All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"
Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and precarious. Since starlink it's a breeze. We will finally be able to get video feeds off of some of the stations; a totally untenable concept before.
Sure, and that's great, but this is an extremely small niche case right? No one is denying that there are some cases where Starlink is amazing, but niche products don't usually command a $1T value.
If you read the SpaceX IPO docs, the vast majority of their self-stated addressable market is AI enterprise SaaS tools.<p>I’m not joking.
And they claimed their TAM was 20% of world GDP!!!
Their IPO made me look up what TAM was, and TBH it looks like the kind of metric where you're allowed to draw the boundaries however you like.<p>To the extent that they're not actually wrong about that TAM:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market#/media/File:TAM-SAM-Market.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market#/medi...</a><p>Note that I am <i>not</i> claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.
I mean, it’s actually not that bad of a play at least here in AK.<p>There’s billions of dollars in monitoring and maintaining remote sites / handling remote connectivity, doing bespoke SaaS tools, etc. Like, literally high hundreds of millions or low billions.
Starlink is wonderful for many reasons.<p>It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.<p>The mobile applications, particularly in the case of airline aircraft, have also been compelling and worth a lot of money to SpaceX.<p>Starlink has also brought broadband Internet to a vast number of people that would not have had it otherwise. This will boost the worldwide economy by an enormous amount.
Starlink only has 10 Million customers, too expensive for most countries already.<p>Starlink brought internet to a lot of people who had it before already but made it easier for them.<p>Its still quite a interesting technology, given, but for the fact that he destroys potentially our atmosphere, has control over war critical tech, can do survailance and wants to send out A Lot MORE into our space, its a net negative for at least 7-8 BILLION people while 10 Millionen people benefit from it.<p>And they even increased the price just a few weeks back...
I don't think rurp was saying there is no market, just that there was no obvious realistic TAM worth 1.6 trillion (going by the amount given by the S-1). How many people living remotely in an area with no fibre do you really expect there to be?
> It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.<p>Turns out a simple water cooler technology is enough. We are all back to office because of efficiency.
It’s a niche, yes, but there could be others like it. No idea about how the company should be valued. We pay them chump change for our services, but enough that with any scale it could be meaningful. And their reach is pretty incredible, so, there is a lot of potential there.
> There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast.<p>I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
Sounds like a similar setup to GAIA on Galiano Island in BC, described here: <a href="https://www.galianonet.org/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.galianonet.org/about</a>
FWIW it may be tenable now as Starlink has gotten much better at tree/obstruction avoidance in the signal and will preemptively switch the satellite it's using when an obstruction is approaching. Id check again.
Can you use a pole.
Starlink has its uses, but I really don't understand those who get starlink while living in built-up areas.<p>Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.<p>There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...
Starlink has more suburban and urban users because there are lots of enclaves without service, reliable service or unlimited service.
For war it is. Drones and other unmanned aircraft are the future of warfare. That's the whole reason why every country now heavily invests in low orbit sats.
It's not about consumers. Also not for spacex. Defence contracts are zillion times more worth. Once you are in you reach the end level as a business.
Family lives in Rio/Brazil. With the efforts from our government every year that passes, public safety becomes worse and suburban areas get more marginalized, it got to a point where the drug traffickers from my area start cutting the fibers and leaving letters on mailboxes saying that from now on, anyone who wanted internet had to get their illegal internet.<p>Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family
So the drug traffickers that cut the fiber have no problem with your Starlink dish outside your home, and don't break it and/or threaten you? If they care, that seems like an oversight they will soon correct once enough people start using it.
They clearly don't want to threaten all the people directly for protection money. That limits what they are willing to do for the scheme. So they cut the cable at places where people are not. This is both efficient in employee time as well as in risk. Starlink antennas can be installed on roofs or in places that aren't easily visible.<p>Also you could install it in things that don't look like it since it only needs an mostly unobstructed view in a cone to the sky. For example I could se an installation in a fake rain barrel, old bathtub inside a stack of firewood. some cloth coverings also would work so it doesn't have to be open either.<p>The only way to find the actual installations would be survey flights that take pictures and compare the data. Then send out inspectors to see if changes on buildings hide starlink antennas.<p>I think the only effect will be that the scheme will go away. Alternatively they could just improve their service so it competes on performance and price with starlink.
A Starlink antennna would create a lot of reflection in anything metal like a barrel or bathtub (why would you even have a bathtub on the roof?).<p>Finding it would be very easy as these houses are not huge houses, enter the house, snip the cables.<p>Besides that, its all hypotetical. Just because in some random shitty neigherhood this issue exists, doesn't mean anything anyway.
That is freaking amazing. I want to be clear that reusable first stage of Falcon 9 + Starlink is the coolest tech that I have ever seen. It was just that for me, the financials didn't work out.
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.<p>Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.<p>I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.<p>But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.<p>Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
> there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure<p>The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.<p>I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.<p>With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.<p>There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.<p>In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:<p>> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.<p>So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?<p>It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
According to SpaceX itself 93% of the company's value is in AI IIRC.
> where does the rest of the valuation come from?<p>AI data centers in space, of course!
SpaceX is by far the most cost effective way in this world to send things into space.<p>That is <i>very</i> valuable.
No its not.<p>The payload we send to space is very limited and the 300% increase in the few last years was ONLY starlink itself.<p>Thats the issue Musk has to sell it to the investors and his idea is datacenter payload.<p>Just that he would need to send 300 Starships up there to even install a smallish datacenter like his own colossus 1.<p>Starship is not done yet, we have not seen it fly up there and return for 300 times at all.
Not according to their prospectus (which was what was asked about), where it accounted for slightly under 2% of SpaceX's market.
There are areas where the bureaucratic hurdles to changing anything and the incentives for changing anything work out to nothing ever changing. I assume in 20 years most of Berlin is still going to have 50mbit/s max. I hear residents of New York have completely given up and are using 5G modems because putting up new cables just isn't practical. On the other hand, these cities do have a significant minority of flats with gigabit internet, so if you care you can pick a modern building with modern cabling. Maybe the segment who both live in old apartments <i>and</i> also are willing to pay for fast internet is too small to bother with.
> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.<p>There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.<p>To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.
The problem with LEO constellation is wasted airtime outside of the country that owns it. Starlink just let anyone pay for the service irrespective of legality and let the leftovers go to waste, but most sane people can't accept that model.<p>They just launch those sats, and straight up serve Internet illegally. Those are the bonkers parts.
India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.
They have nukes and are always on the verge of war with Pakistan (who also have nukes). I'm sure they have money for war, everyone always does.
They have an actual space program that launches actual satellites. They have also been in several actual, non-hypothetical wars.
To launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement.<p>To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, <i>and</i> cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.
What makes you think india is "super super" poor? India's GDP is humongous (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...</a>).
India's total exports are in the same ballpark as the Netherlands, a country with half the population of the city of Bombay.<p>India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.
The denominator
The page you need to look at is GDP per capita:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...</a><p>…which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.
Same as Russia, yeah. But Reliance Jio seems to have announced something. Don't know if it'll actually happen.
>And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.<p>I don't know about the rest, but Russia started working on its own Starlink well before the war. We have the North and Siberia where satellite internet is the only option. Another target market is Russian Railways which would love to have internet in the trains not only when they pass areas with mobile coverage.
Not just cruise ships, but practically every boat with a bed in it. People sailing on small boats all around the world have starlink now. It's kind of a game changer in a lot of ways for small boats.
As with the data centers, starlink is not actually what people think it is. There’s a military purpose underlying its public front
I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India<p>You just said it yourself:<p>> Then, only months later, but after years of planning:<p>Starlink is no replacement for fiber, but even all across the EU and the US there are many places without fiber access.
Well, it has proven itself to be a very useful military asset in Ukraine.<p>The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.<p>And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.<p>If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment on land).
I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So now I have starlink as a backup. It's a very small portable unit that I can also take when camping. It's a great service. Also it's powering a lot of airlines now, it's fast and reliable to the point I can watch youtube and tiktok on my flights.
<i>300</i>Gbps? Is that typo? Unless you are connecting to some very particular infrastructure on the other one, nothing you could possibly connect to could use it, and you would need gear that would be somewhat high end even for server grade.<p>(I know you said you didn't select that option, but just the idea that it's even offered to residential units is mind blowing).
No, not a typo. Ziply has 300 Gbps at my house if I want to pay $900 a month. Instead I pay $65 for 2 Gbps
Usually there is a 300 Mbps - 10 Gbps range of offerings.
That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.
From India here:<p>With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).<p>And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.
In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.
I think that while Starlink is a technical innovation its primary benefit is as a political innovation: it lets you sidestep a lot of politics.<p>Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.
If we can get internet from the sky, it's hard to justify digging up the earth with cables for the same thing.<p>I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.
I disagree, maintaining a giant fleet of satellites is almost certainly more expensive in the long run than just running a lot of cable. Not that cable doesn’t need maintenance but Starlink needs to replace every satellite every five years. And they can’t recycle a thing, they just burn up.<p>You’re presenting a false choice. It isn’t “Starlink or no internet”, it’s “why not other internet options?”
More expensive for whom?
A v2 Starlink satellite costs $800K and on average 25 are launched at once. Launch cost for a reusable Falcon 9 is $15 million. So that's $1.4 million per satellite to orbit lasting 5 years that's $280K / sat / y, or $2.8 billion / y to maintain a constellation of 10,000. And SpaceX is not known for complacency. The unit cost will continue to drop.<p>On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.
600k excluding launch
> provide service to the entire world<p>If the entire world used Starlink it would grind to a halt. They’d need to spend exponentially more to have more satellites to provide that necessary bandwidth.
Starlink has 10 MILLION customers. Thats just nothing.<p>All the investment in Fiber and mobile towers are long lasting investments.<p>Starlink NEEDS v3 to scale because they already have scaling issues. They need Starship, which doesn't work yet, to work to even send v3 up there.<p>And while Spacex has some first mover advantage, other companies start doing the same which will eat their margins. Makes it even more complicated to run all of it.<p>They have to do 300k orbit correction already last year, kessler syndrom can happen which will block access to space for all of us.<p>We don't even know yet how dangerous the poisoning of our atmosphere will be.
Its very easy to dig.<p>You still need a powerline to your house, sewer and water.<p>There are plenty of fibers and dark fibers on power pools.<p>Starlink doesn't 'just' pollute the night sky for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN (8 Billion people) it can also poisen our atmosphere when they re-enter and burn up.
Assuming there are poles (or trenches) for electricity, cable is a modest addition.
I think that's the idea of robust competition.<p>if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.
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I don’t know why India is mentioned here.<p>I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available
I have a really good friend who used Starlink for his cottage in Canada and as soon as there was broadband he switched away. Starlink was unreliable and slow compared to what he has now.<p>In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.
I have it, I live in a very rural place.<p>I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.<p>It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).<p>But reliability has been almost 100%
I wonder if that was at the beginning. They've been quietly launching so many satellites over time.
Unreliable usually means not a clear signal? May have needed to adjust the install.
He probably had it pointed at trees. It was super reliable for me when I worked from a rural location in Maine for a couple of months.
There's many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.
The sailing-around-the-world (and similar) market is obviously miniscule. The isolated communities probably tend to be on the less affluent part of the world, so it doesn't seem to justify a 100x expansion.
This is great right? Lets pollute our sky for 8 Billion people that tyjen can send a whatsapp message to people while sailing.<p>Awesome!
Starlink has worked great for us so far from Europe to Polynesia. Prices keep going up, so would be nice if the service had actual competition.<p>The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.<p>And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.
Australian here. We generally have 1st world internet for most towns. The moment you are outside suburbia, speeds are embarrassingly slow. On my own farm, we dont even have power, or city water, and little to no mobile / cellular reception. We are like hundreds of thousands of other people with rural property here. I suspect the same is true in New Zealand, much of South America, Pacific Islands, Indian Ocean Islands, rural Canada, and often times rural USA.
Many places have incompetent government that can't/won't build proper infrastructure. For example, the US has allocated around $50B for rural broadband and almost nothing has been built.
Fiber deployment is bottlenecked by Baumol's Cost Disease: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect</a>. There's basically no productivity gains being made in how quickly skilled laborers can deploy fiber. Like everything else involving skilled labor, the price keeps going up.
India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.<p>India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.
In Europe, even rural areas tend to be fairly close to cities, whereas in North America, lots of farms are <i>really</i> remote. This map from NASA [0] should give you an idea of how remote some areas can be.<p>Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.<p>[0]: <a href="https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/images/imagerecords/79000/79765/dnb_land_ocean_ice.2012.13500x6750.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/i...</a>
Subsidies make anything possible. Your grandkids will be paying for that fibre. Starlink is revolutionary for long last-mile links that will never be economic.
Outside of war, ships and planes, I agree with you, that their benefit doesn’t seem like all that.<p>But then again, I never thought WiFi would take over wired network cables, but now even my desktop is connected with WiFi.<p>I also didn’t think cellular would be a replacement for copper or fiber, but now my modem for the apartment is 5G.<p>Both ended up being good enough, easier and cheaper (!)
I'd agree with the last part of your comment. Because at least India doesn't depend upon Starlink for broadband access. Even in remote regions, now that it has seen first hand what modern economic and tech blockade means (after struggling for decades with older sanctions including related to nuclear tests and thank goodness it did that), it really isn't very keen on Starlink and wants home-grown alternatives (which definitely will take time) and also is now indicating to multiple players that they are welcome (but within limits and regulations).<p>Musk isn't pushing Starlink for "upside" for the people or your "central EU", or Africa, or India, or the moon (let's just assume for the time being), Musk is hoping to saturate the market and remain the only player or only major player, and Musk wants that perceived dependency as a weapon, as a tool of control. I won't be shocked if Musk later lobbies for "ah, too many satellites up there already.. it'd be dangerous to send more… ". In fact I am counting on that.<p>> where they have <.1% the money<p>That's another part where, again, I'd agree with the last part of your comment. That country has so many people that just from one region if enough rich people (and sadly with the great divide there are way too many), if they need it, it will outspend too many countries from Europe single-handedly when it comes to Starlink or satellite Internet access.<p>Having said that, these things are not this black and white… but I've tried at least one part, or rather a fraction of one part I'd say.<p>Satellite Internet is one of the best things I'd say but I'd bet my spare kidney that not in the hands of Musk and Musk is trying hard that he/Starlink becomes the almost single player, first mover etc etc.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.<p>Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.<p><a href="https://www.spacex.com/starshield" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacex.com/starshield</a>
Its also a pricing thing; in Australia our nationalised provider keeps getting more expensive, starlink is now getting cost-competitive.
Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.
OK, so for this, Starlink is AMAZING! In-flight Starlink is undeniable.<p>The first time I experienced it, I could not believe what was happening. I messaged my nerd friends with screenshots of <a href="https://speed.cloudflare.com/" rel="nofollow">https://speed.cloudflare.com/</a><p>Also, their required zero-friction UX is the shiznit.<p>Then, I fell asleep as I finally had theoretical time off.
I’ve read so many posts from both CEOs and programmers about their higher in-flight productivity thanks to be offline.
I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.
Gate to gate (if the plane door is closed) wifi has been a thing for most (all?) of the US airlines for awhile. Delta's wifi is ok, but I routinely have issues. It could be a combination of older technology on the plane and worse satellite network, but it's supposedly nowhere near as good as plane with Starlink.<p>I also use Starlink at my house in Italy. I'm in a decent sized town, but there is no fiber available. It has worked great, and more importantly took about 10 minutes to setup.
Starlink speed and bandwidth is way ahead of any of the existing satellite internet providers.
I believe Viasat internet satellites are placed in geostationary orbit, whereas SpaceX Starlink is not, so the service Viasat provides is already blown out.
Long latency makes Viasat good for some things and not so good for others.
And this is exactly why we don't need internet on planes.
I am from Sri Lanka, which is a large island.<p>We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.<p>Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.
It's very popular in rural US where running wired broadband is cost prohibitive.<p>There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.
Exactly. Central Europe is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet outside of Asia. High population density makes fiber more economical, and low population density, the inverse. As other la have pointed out, India actually has very deep fiber penetration exactly for this reason. The Americas, by contrast, are largely devoid of people which makes the economics of any networking infrastructure harder
Right the areas that companies took money to roll out high speed internet to, then just kept the money and called DSL high speed or just did nothing. The government should keep giving companies money and investing in them. It's brilliant.
Elon turning off Russian access to Starlink by whitelisting only authorized terminals in the region was a turning point for Ukraine's success. The conflict has proven that modern warfare depends on Starlink and its mimics.
Some day before invading Taiwan China and Russia will try to take them all down: <a href="https://archive.is/AMIxX" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/AMIxX</a>
China has a huge microwave to destroy any kind of Starlink over its head.
Same. I bought a cabin, which had the equivalent of pretty good DSL. I got starlink and immediately cancelled it when 2gbps fiber arrived 9mo later. Fiber is rolling out faster than a lot of people think.
There are many places, even in the US, where your only alternative is--believe it or not--dial-up modems. Others had painfully slow--1 Mbps up, 5 Mbps down--Internet.
Fibre is better if you have a static point on land like a farm. It works less well if you're in a moving vehicle or if you're at sea.
It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.<p>Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.
I have a good friend who relies upon Starlink for connectivity for his home in southeastern Ohio (USA).<p>We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.<p>So far, Starlink is the win.<p>(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)
From a purely utilitarian standpoint, direct to cell feels like a good thing to me. Large swathes of Scotland don't even have sufficient mobile connection to send a text message (some people will tell you that's a good thing, but I'm not one of them).
Eeh even ther its a stretch , when people talk about Africa - they should really specify where exactly. PLaces like SouthAfrica [1] already have a robust Fiber network with accelerated buildout of FTTH. Ditto for most of Eastern Africa countries which have FTTH to most of the major cities and subururbs with accelerated buildouts ongoing.
Unless its a conflict area most regions are getting wired up pretty fast to enhancce business connectivity - the speeds and bandwith for starlink make noe economic sense once a developing pop are factored in.The only major push for many countries approvals is basically strong armed and shaken down by the US admin on behalf of Musk[2].<p>[1]<a href="https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollout-2026" rel="nofollow">https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-facing-tariffs-184114152.html" rel="nofollow">https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...</a>
Starlink is a military project, but they dont say that in public.
I feel like no-earth orbit is always going to beat out low-earth orbit in the long-term. I live an area that the USDA classifies as rural and I now have multiple fiber options, including municipal. This isn't to say that Starlink doesn't have its place and I only see it becoming more niche over time and facing more competition in the LEO segment.
I live in what is probably the first place to get these things in the world, but it feels like fiber is being built at an extremely rapid pace. Just in the past couple of years it seems like Google and AT&T fiber went from being a relatively confined thing to being available everywhere in the city, and everywhere outside, and at my friend's ranch 100 miles in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere.
Given that fiber's been around for literal decades, though, and the Internet hasn't recently gotten more popular or anything, why would this suddenly have changed? I could believe what people are saying re. Starlink providing competition and finally incentivizing fiber buildouts
I live in a major Indian city and 1 gig fiber up and down is $30. We've also got really good 4G/5G in most places. Also in the super remote areas WiMAX is (still) an option.
I suppose one real upside is that in very regulated areas with only one operator this gives them some baseline regarding service that they actually need to beat.
Starlink is a problem that solves itself. If enough fiber rolls out that there's no more customers, they'll scale back satellites (since they only last 3-5 years).
Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.<p>Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.<p>It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.<p>Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.
Who digs up fibres to sell? It's worthless material. Copper yes but nobody lays that anymore. If it even has to be metal it's usually mostly aluminium.
You'd be amazed at how unintelligent about things tweakers are. They don't know it is fibre when they are taking it. It doesn't keep all of the users on the other end of those lines from losing signal.
They dig up the fibre to check that it isn't copper.
Starlink is popular in rural England. Trenching fibre to farmland isn't economical and poor DSL is often the only other option.
<i>>Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.</i><p>Except there's rich parts like Germany or Austria where internet infra is poorly run due to monopolistic telco capture and regulations keeping infra upgrades costs high, and so have slower and more expensive internet than Starlink in some areas. Poorer nations of EU often have faster internet than the richer ones so poverty is not a reason.<p>So Starlink is definitely still relevant. I've seen several small/medium businesses here in Austria that have a starlink terminal as a backup.
How much did it cost to have fiber ran to your house from the road?
People who live out in rural areas. Think farmers, or just people who love living out on their own lands, common enough in the US. I have a friend who lives off Starlink internet, it would cost way too much to get internet all the way to his property, not really worth it.
Here in Alaska it’s literally better than the cable internet (except apparently for gaming but I don’t really game), and $10/mo cheaper for a starlink roam.<p>At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.
How much did EU taxpayers spend to make that possible?
One place where fiber cables cannot reach would be... way up in the air. Think about how many people fly each day and then remember how poor internet connectivity and speeds are at 40,000 ft.<p>So Starlink in flights seems like a perfect fit.
Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.<p>In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.<p>Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.
There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet
Ships and jets are different segments from residential. Planes are definitely a textbook use case for satellite internet, but just like airlines are in a race-to-the-bottom for everything from in-flight snacks to legroom, they're not going to spring for premier high-quality internet service, they're just going to scrape by with the bare minimum. The market potential is not spectacularly impressive. Meanwhile, for residential services, rural areas continue to shrink, the people remaining in rural areas tend to be poorer, and the rural areas where rich people live have fiber, because the rich people can pay for it. Satellite internet will remain a crucial service for certain rural populations, but it's not going to take over the world, and it's not going to justify an order of magnitude more launches. Let's stop beating around the bush: the bull case for both Starlink and SpaceX is that the US military sees them as indispensible military assets, the former for global logistics, and the latter for the rapid weaponization of space.
The obvious is the cost of deploying. You don't need to dig to add cable. Full country coverage. Worldwide customers.
I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.<p>However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.<p>Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.
I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.
i live a few miles west of core Palo Alto (technically, still in Palo Alto); Starlink is my only real choice for broadband, and it's great.
one difference is that fiber isn't mobile.<p>Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.<p>Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.
I am also in rural EU and have 1 house that has fiber, and another, 10 minute drive away has nothing, not even cell signal and it won't get anything any time soon. Starlink is basically the only option.
I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.
Most people hate Comcast’s and att duopoly so much that’s reason enough to get starlink. I just got it in ca and it works very well
In America for my lifetime I have never been able to get fiber and it’s because America is too large and I live in an affluent suburb.
It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.<p>Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's <i>immensely</i> valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.<p>WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.<p>I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few <i>very reliable</i> low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.
Maybe it’s about the power to control the internet (and what is does and doesn’t serve) worldwide.
India has one of the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. In fact you can get an extremely fast download atop Himalayan mountains in comparison to remote USA
I have a friend who does not live that remote in Australia and his choice is either "satellite" internet or starlink.<p>It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.
Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.
Everyone at sea, uses them now.
> EU funding brought fiber to my farm area<p>Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well
seems like starlink is useful for armed conflicts
This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.<p>Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.<p>Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.<p>So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.<p>Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.<p>Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.<p>Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.
I live in Norway. Starlink is cheaper than FTTH by a country mile. At the very least it's going to force down prices for fiber providers.<p>Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.
This is a military tech.
India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).
> the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India<p>Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know
India? It has the world’s cheapest data rates and nearly 90% of the population have 5G coverage. They don’t need this.
I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.<p>So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.<p>So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.
24/7 high fidelity radar of the entire earth’s surface. Probably used by NRO’s sentient system and similar classified skynet projects
Elon is probably setting sup the infra for space data centers.
India can lay some fiber. The secret is that every time a road gets repaved it gets dug up a week later so easy conduit pathway.<p>(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)
My parents live in New York State, 8 miles from the main east-west transportation and data corridor. They still have no high speed wired internet options. No fiber, no cable, no DSL, and dialup ISP has been retired long ago. Their only option is satellite. This is in 4th most populous state in the US, and #1 highest GDP/capita. Internet across the United States does not have the penetration many think, the US is vast.
I live not to far from NYC and I think it’s fantastic. Comcast was charging me 75 a month and Starlink charges me 40 for the same service which is generally excellent
You are in a dense population. A large chunk of the world (and many people even in the US) are in low density environments where fiber rollouts are too expensive.
You’d be surprised how poor broadband Internet coverage is outside of major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some places are simply off-grid, or have to rely on dial up. All you have to do is drive an hour out and there’s no more Internet.
But would that have happened that way if Starlink hadn't come about?
the next generation of satellites base stations that are currently going up remove the need for base stations<p>you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone<p>but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient<p>lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road<p>week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks<p>I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical<p>speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription<p>bigger satellites will bring that to everyone
It's good to have option in case your own government turns rogue.
People in rural parts of America where ISPs don't want to expand into.
They seem to be expanding even across rural America. These days it's fairly common for small and medium size towns to have access to 500mbps-1gbps for $50-$90 per month, and essentially all small cities and above.<p>Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.<p>The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.
The word "rural" by definition typically refers to areas outside of a town or city.
It is far from complete but yeah I got co-op 1 gig fiber in my rural 56k only area like 2-3 years ago. Some places nearby still don't have it but expansion is ongoing. Some select areas are starting to offer 2 gig but im unsure what most users would use it for.
Fastest option I can get where I am is 260 Mbps for $250 from a local wireless ISP...<p>This makes starlink tempting but for that I'd have to run cabling 50 plus. M to get the this where it has a clear view of the sky...<p>(Edit) A nearby small town is installing municipal fiber right now, which is great, but that's half an hour away.
Do you think those prices would be available if SpaceX wasn't providing strong competition?
You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.
You’re not dumb. It has come up in extremely sophisticated valuations of SpaceX pre-IPO, if I recall off the top of my head, the only business that actually had any value, StarLink, assumes an irrational TAM.
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Surely funding cell towers in Africa / India is cheaper and easier to maintain than 100k satellites in space.