the biggest win here are productivity gains. After high speed internet is available, you'll be able to work in the bush with a laptop. away from ridiculous rents and rent-seekers.
The most interesting aspect is that an import ban on LEO satellite modems becomes exponentially harder to enforce when you’re the only country that can manufacture them at scale in the first place.
The connection might be slow and spotty from Fuzhou, but all you'd need is a modem sold out the backdoor of a factory and an account created in Taiwan (perhaps a friend you Alipay for the subscription), and you'd have unfiltered internet in eastern Fujian.
Oneweb is their main competitor who has already launched test satellites but they are going to launch on other companies rockets which are much more expensive than spacex's especially now that spacex is getting reusability down.
Amazon just announced their constellation plans and they either have to launch on expensive non-spacex rockets or have to use blue origin which while they are planning to have fully reusable rockets, those are still years out.
What are the other 3 companies that will be out first and/or have higher throughput and/or how are Amazon/Oneweb better?
And the argument that SpaceX has some kind of moat because of their launch business is simply not true. there are many launch providers out there, and launch costs have gone way down partly due to SpaceX, but also because satellite orders have decreased significantly. SpaceX as a company, needs as much revenue as possible to fund the satellite venture, since their entire company is depending on it. The launch business is not sustainable in providing enough revenue in the future to keep them in business. so SpaceX will have to fight for business from all the other satellites just as much as any other company.
1)https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
I just read that article and it makes no claims whatsoever in relation to costs.
> which is important since it's not clear SpaceX has a path to revenue [2].
Path to revenue? What does that even mean?
> if you've been following starling closely, you know that they will not have anywhere near their full deployment for over 5 years after the first launches. the entire fleet is required for the capacity they have been touting, not to mention the coverage.
US/Europe coverage is going to be their primary initial target as that is where the most money is and that requires a significantly smaller amount of satellites. Care to enlighten us on what other companies are planning to launch production satellites like spacex is doing next month because the only company I am aware of that has even launched test satellites is oneweb.
Path to profit.
You are saying SpaceX launch a handful of these satellites is really going to have any effect?They already launched some and they had propulsion problems. They need upwards of 500 of these in the air just to compete with satellites that have been up for multiple years already.
The source you linked said Telesat had a 4x Gbps/satellite bandwidth over spacex which is not directly tied to cost. Telesat has no mention of satellite weight and spacex plans to launch 40x the amount of satellites as Telesat for their initial constellation and 100x at full capacity if I recall correctly.
> Path to profit.
Spacex has reusable first stage rockets. I don't see how any of the other mass satellite constellation companies that you mentioned can have better margins than spacex.
> They need upwards of 500 of these in the air just to compete with satellites that have been up for multiple years already.
Do those 5 companies you just mentioned somehow don't?
Read the study again. It's useable capacity. You cannot use the 20Gbps number SpaceX advertises.
And can any of these competitors compete on orbital insertion price / rocket availability with SpaceX?
The entire concept is that SpaceX is basically going for backbone global fiber delivery, not end users as first customers at first at least.
As long as SpaceX can do the Satellite tech needed, I can't see how they can loose long term. Elon does not think small.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
The satellites are not the hard part, even though they are extremely hard. The hard part is going to be getting a suitable user antenna for a low enough cost that they will make the money back. So far they have not spoken publicly about their user terminal or cost, other than a couple sound bites musk said years ago about how low he wants the cost.
100% sure Tesla will either apply great firewall in China or just shut sats down while they are there, because China will threaten shutting gigafactory.
It is no surprise that an ISP operating in China will be subject to Chinese law. The last-mile method is not really relevant.
You can't change law with technology...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150329174815/http://shitelonsa...