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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

How could thousands of satellites launched every year be a solution to bringing internet to the whole world? Do you have any idea how expensive Starlink will be? Whole villages won't be able to afford a single base station at current prices, and they are losing money today.

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I'm a westerner, but lived in a village in Indonesia for 6 weeks. I agree the cost of a base station + monthly fees would be exorbitant for most living in the village as currently priced for the US market. Interesting note though, they had satellite dishes with pirate decoders to watch satellite TV, which gave them access to things like American movies. This is in a place where a cup of coffee was $0.10 and a pack of cigarettes was something like $1. The family I lived with had four kids, the father climbed trees to collect juice to ferment into tuak, which they sold at a roadside stop for something like $0.05/bottle. They also had a small farm. They were able to afford running non-potable water, electricity, TV + satellite dish + decoder, and cheap cell phones with data connections. I'm sure Starlink would be priced in a way that was affordable in the local economy should it get there, and that people that have no other internet options will take it up and join the modern world. I think that will be a net win for society.

Not a direct reply, but Starlink will also enable some interesting scenarios around open internet access in places where it doesn't exist today - like the Middle East during the Arab Spring, or in China, or in North Korea.

> I'm sure Starlink would be priced in a way that was affordable in the local economy should it get there

But this is the problem: it can't. With cables, the cost is location dependent because it is dominated by the local cost of work.

But starlink has limited bandwidth, and their cost is dominated by the satellites and launches, and by the work of highly skilled engineers in America. Every extra subscriber costs them a lot, and they can't make money by launching millions of dollars worth of satellites and charging 10$ a month.

> Not a direct reply, but Starlink will also enable some interesting scenarios around open internet access in places where it doesn't exist today - like the Middle East during the Arab Spring, or in China, or in North Korea.

Why do you think that? Satellite signals are easy to detect and jam, unfortunately. Especially since satellite internet requires you to transmit, not just receive. If you were right, those places would already have satellite television access to news around the world.

I think you're reasoning off incorrect premises: the starlink satellites are only relaying to relatively local base stations. In a sense, they're basically acting as a synthetic ionosphere to bounce signals off to reach base stations that wouldn't otherwise be line-of-sight, but which are still regional. And as such, they don't have nearly the same bandwidth limitations as more conventional satellites have.

Citation needed on satellite signals being easy to jam. These satellites are moving rapidly across the sky, with directional (phased) antenna arrays tracking them. To have a good chance at jamming, your transmitter needs to remain in the path of the signal.

Launches will only get cheaper over time. The base station is also likely to decrease in price over time due to economies of scale.

Starlink is one of the very few satellite providers that can provide enough bandwidth (due to the large constellation) that an entire village could share a single base station.

> Launches will only get cheaper over time. The base station is also likely to decrease in price over time due to economies of scale.

This is much more true for cable than it is for satellite launches, a d yet it hasn't really happened.

> Starlink is one of the very few satellite providers that can provide enough bandwidth (due to the large constellation) that an entire village could share a single base station.

Starlink needs a huge paying base to pay for the huge cost of the constellation, which needs to be rebuilt and re-launched every 5 years. Every extra customer reduces the bandwidth that the constellation can offer to every other customer, so overall their cost per customer will be exorbitant.

Remember that the prices we are seeing today are heavily subsidized by the US government, and they are anyway selling at a considerable loss. The bandwidth we are seeing today is the bandwidth of 1600 satellites and a handful of customers - it is basically a best case scenario, at least for the current technology.

As far as I know, starlink has not been subsidized by the government. They recently won an rdof grant to provide service to rural areas in the US, but this grant was received after most of the satellites were in orbit.

Musk always seems to be thinking two steps ahead, so perhaps Starlink is just an enabler for a future, more profitable product.

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