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Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

>A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here.

You're talking latency not bandwidth. There is only so much spectrum to go around.

My understanding is that there is only a certain amount of bandwidth to go around and there are diminishing returns on adding people beyond a set capacity. I am not arguing that fiber is faster, I'm arguing that fiber has is cheaper at the bandwidth/cost in more dense areas. I don't believe we will see satellite based communication in cities (at a large % of population) for a long time.

Now I'm willing to believe someone who's worked closer to this than I have and to learn, but I've done enough in the satellite industry to not take what you're saying without seeing more evidence.

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I worked for an ILEC providing cable/dsl/fiber service and just the rough napkin math around SpaceX's launch costs makes it look significantly cheaper.

Besides the whole digging and laying cable costs, last mile work is expensive. You have to employ huge crews. Construction crews constantly dig up & cut your infrastructure "by accident" and the cost of recovering the fines from them is as much as the fines pay out. Having to send an emergency crew of three guys out for 18 hours of work to re-splice a 72-ct fiber every other weekend adds up. That doesn't happen in space.

The SpaceX approach also completely bypasses a ton of the nonsense local bureaucracy, stonewalling by existing ISPs, etc that a company would have to deal with to put in cables, towers, etc in the first place, saving both time and money.

Yup. This is actually one of the more important factors for consumers that is underestimated.

I've been pegged at 1000% excitement since I first found out about this project a year ago. This is the best thing to happen to this service industry since probably ISDN.

This is not a good thing. Eventually countries will heavily regulate satellites and then SpaceX will be the monopoly that keeps small players out. Instead of postponing the problem of getting rid of an evil monopoly, citizens should realize that last mile internet delivery is practically identical to water, sewage and power systems that can be owned by the city and leased out to providers.

FWIW, last mile costs only matter if your last mile isn't wireless, more or less. Terrestrial internet doesn't imply wire/fiber to the premises, does it?

The costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure scale down to nothing with population density. Also you can upgrade a switch but not if it's on a satellite. I am very convinced that the two approaches will complement each other in the foreseeable future.

Please post your napkin math. That seems to disagree with all the other analysts' math.

>last mile work is expensive.

What do you mean there?

SpaceX isn't doing the install work work on these Starlink kits. They just sell you some hardware.

If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work. They have salaries and they make (lots of) overtime pay. At a lot of the smaller companies (like the one I worked at) they have pensions. We had a lot of guys who started with the company out of high school, retired at 20 years, came back as contractors for a year and then did another 20 years and got a second pension from the same company...

And a couple of those guys are still contracting after their two pensions.

SpaceX can't scale regionally, they have to scale globally. The nature of their satellites is that if they want to accommodate 2x as many users in a city they have to double their capacity.

The push I'm discussing is the cost to get a baseline internet out there for 10k people per 100 miles.

I'm assuming the cost per last mile is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. If that's true right now the majority of our population is in cities so SpaceX will have trouble reaching them.

That's the core of my point. For Starlink to hit everyone in a city they'd have a huge amount of wasted capacity in rural areas.

Satellites also degrade naturally over time. They have a set lifetime and don't all last that long. Cables under the ground tend to last longer even if they require spot fixes. I'm assuming that bandwidth wise, the cables are more efficient at least until getting manufactured equipment to space becomes even more cheaper.

Yeah but we're talking about a company that has in their near-term plans the capability to _launch 4 rockets per day_.

They're completely capable of adding capacity like that and having a high satellite count.

I'm not saying that it doesn't have a cost, but they have no middleman. They don't need to buy space on somebody else's rocket. They also don't have to pay any ongoing maintenance cost beyond equipment replacement and it's much cheaper than doing it on land. I know that you have satellite experience but their launch costs are a fraction of what other companies have done till now.

I worked for a suburban, regional ILEC and our operating costs were around 100 million a year to cover like two counties of maybe 100k customers and the local businesses.

...

I actually do agree with you about costs delivering in dense markets as providing locally has certain "economy of scale" benefits. It's also not going to compete on the "Gigabit in every home" front, because I do agree that the bandwidth is more limited. Operating a local provider in general though is extremely expensive and doesn't really provide any additional benefit to the provider. SpaceX themselves have uses for this network. I also hope that I'm right here :)

The bandwidth here is 100K per state not 2 counties. That's my issue with your calculations, we're probably somewhere in the middle. They might stop servicing people outside of town. I'd probably use the metric, if you're on septic you're probably better served by SpaceX than Comcast. If you're on sewer then Comcast will probably be better (no not always, I'm no sith).

We'll have to agree to disagree. Honestly, I hope you're correct and I'm wrong. I think ground based infrastructure is still going to be much cheaper at medium to high population densities. You don't agree with me, but I learned a lot in this back and forth. Thanks.

Their target launch cadence has been missed by quite a bit for many years. At this point they are only launching their own satellites at a cost to them, and not launching very many paying customer payloads at all.

This is absolutely not true. They are still selling you a dish in a terminal that most of the population could not install themselves on their house. The majority of the installs will be professionaly done.

That's not what I'm saying. Forest for trees.

SpaceX isn't doing the installation work. They're not hiring the fleet of techs to do the work.

No satellite companies do that. They are independent contractors.

This thread isn't about what other satellite providers do. It's about the Cable/Fiber/DSL providers. And even when those companies use contractors to do the work (like Spectrum, Comcast, etc), they're still the ones paying those contractors.

Let's keep it on-topic.

Please reread this thread. This is the comment I was replying to:

> SpaceX isn't doing the install work work on these Starlink kits. They just sell you some hardware. If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work

This is not true. SpaceX is absolutely going to be doing most of the installs through independent contractors. The original post implied they just ship you the antenna and the end user can set it up, which is wrong.

Absolutely not correct. Read the terms from what they sent everyone in the beta program:

"You are responsible for installing the Starlink Kit. Do not allow third parties, or those not associated with SpaceX, to access or install the Starlink Kit unless you obtain approval from SpaceX," Starlink says.

"Do not install the Starlink Kit at your home if you do not have the authority to do so. It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with all applicable zoning, ordinances, covenants, conditions, restrictions, lease obligations and landlord/owner approvals related to the installation location."

SpaceX is not doing any of these installs themselves or through contractors. They've been very up front about this and how it's not just going to be for the beta program.

Keep up the FUD though.

It's a phased array antenna -- it's really simple to install. People are already doing this themselves on top of RVs and work trucks. It has motors that are self-adjusting. Their instructions are "1) plug in socket, 2) point at sky."

Wrong. A beta program where they don't want things leaked is very different from the real system. They self-selected a group of people capable of doing this. Do you really think that millions of real customers are capable installing on their own? More importantly, doing this without an issue later that requires calling customer service. It doesn't matter if it's a phased array. It MUST be installed securely in a location where there would be no blocking. This requires a professional. Trust me, I'm very familiar with this industry, and Elon can't work magic. You are taking your own understanding of how the general population is and assuming they're all reddit/HN readers.

Please show me where they've been up front that after the beta it will continue to do this. Also remember that almost everything Elon has said about starlink has turned out to not be accurate or delayed.

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