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Comment by alphydan | Hacker News Reader

> 40 million subscribers to the service by 2025, amounting to $30 billion in revenue that year.

$30,000/40/12 ≈ $63/mo

For internet in a remote location of the world? Where do I sign up?

Currently you can get Iridium satellite phone with unlimited data minutes for 125/month. The connection speed is less than 10kbit/s.

$63/month 1Gb/s for a remote village, island or a ship with 10-500 users who share the bandwidth is not that bad. 40 million subscribers might serve 100-500 million people.

Please check this comparison:

http://www.globalmarinenet.com/compare-iridium-inmarsat-and-...

More interestingly, how will Internet work on Mars?

It will probably have its own satellite network that serves as the Mars internet, with a high-latency intermittent bridge to the Earth internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

Where high-latency is a ping of somewhere between 364,000ms and 2,684,000ms depending on the date.

Tcp seems like a really bad protocol for this.

There already is a bunch of RFCs in place for high latency protocols.

Famously RFC1149: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 . I suspect that wouldn’t fly in an interplanetary scenario though.

I think https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1217 might be more appropriate, and even touches on the relevant topic in section 5(e).

on Mars a NAS is must have.

We should call it the InterPlaNet if that ever happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlaNet

Heh, cool :) Thank you for that link.

$63/month is the average though, so it seems like it will be really expensive for customers in developed countries.

As far as I understand you also need a relatively large antenna on your roof for it to work.

Depends on how they expect growth to go. They may design things for a break even of 100 million users with minor 'subsidies' to assist growth.

It also doesn't include revenue from backbone services that the same projections planned to form the bulk of Starlink's business. Consumer revenues (and thus average prices) are lower.

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