Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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I understand you are probably at a very early stage of product design for the satellite capabilities, so you are cagey and don't want to make any definitive statements of technical specs... But I'd rather not move the discussion off forum into private email when the other people reading this thread could possibly benefit from answers to my specific questions.

I am kind of concerned that your answers to others' questions in this thread are vague and noncommittal.

One more question. Do you intend to:

(A) lease raw transponder kHz capacity to third party end users and ISPs (eg: the ku spot beams I can get on Russian satellites covering Afghanistan and a check for $4500 USD a month,

or (b) is your business plan to operate both the satellites and the earth stations, and resell fully packaged VSAT services directly to end users?

(C) Trust investors don't know enough physics to question the business plan.

See also: Theranos, uBeam, etc.

I just took a look at the currently frontpaged "Who's hiring" thread. Lots of software development, of course.

Hardware startups are costly and hard.

Now do it on super hard mode and build a thing that has to go 36,000+ km away, never to be seen or touched by a human, and make it super reliable.

We're lucky to work with a great group of investors-- the investors we work with at Andreessen Horowitz both have PhD's, one in CS, the other in EE. Our investor at Lux Capital has a PhD in RF engineering. Another of our investors has a PhD in particle physics. Couldn't ask for a more knowledgable, technically minded group.

Yes the plan is to lease bandwidth.

I'm always happy to answer basic questions about what we're doing. But questions around very specific technical details, especially when it comes to things that give us a competitive advantage like our antenna design, just aren't appropriate for a public forum. Thanks for understanding.

For more detailed questions we may or may not be able to answer them via email. But certainly I'd be happy to take a look at it and if its appropriate put them in touch with the relevant member of the team. (See-- https://www.astranis.com/about/)

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