SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal
the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need to be simultaneously in view of a CPE and a starlink run earth station.
what they've got right now is a viable competitor for the smaller geostationary based ku and ka band maritime vsat packages sold for coastal region use, which are limited to specific ku and ka band spot beams anyways. such as you might see used in the caribbean and Mediterranean oceans.
when they have more polar orbit satellites and the satellite-to-satellite laser links are working they will have full mid ocean coverage, and I have no doubt it will beat the pants off a $200,000+, 2.4 meter C-band stabilized-in-radome maritime VSAT system with a monthly service cost of $8,500+.
anyone that's ever done the link budget calculations and seen the RF channel sizes and very simple modulations (very poor bps/Hz ratio) needed to make IP data over 2.4m size c-band terminals will know what I'm talking about. this is directly proportional to dollars in the monthly recurring costs for ongoing transponder space use.
the performance and dollar per MB cost right now for coastal region use will absolutely beat anything inmarsat or iridium based by a ridiculous margin.
I fundamentally disagree with you that it's a very competitive market, it's a market that's highly dependent upon the business model of launching 3500-6000 kg things into geostationary orbit at immense cost and trying to recoup the construction+launch cost of them before they die in 13 to 16 years. And military/government contracts. Traditional two way geostationary based satellite comms stuff is a very conservative and moribund segment of the telecom industry.
you've got other things out there that are sort of viable like o3b (now owned/controlled by SES), but anyone that's ever priced an o3b terminal and ongoing service on something like a 36 month term will know that it's not a significant improvement in cost.
edit: MASSIVE miscalculation fixed!
Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's round. So $4 billion annually. Over 12 years of satellite lifetime that's 48 billion. Satellites cost $300k to make, so subtract another 4 billion for production (44 remaining). Sats are launched in batches of 50, requiring 240 launches. Internal costs are somewhere between 30 to 60 million, it's unclear because of reuse, let's say 50 million for 12 billion launch costs, leaving 3 billion a year.
And then there's some operational costs which they pay from that.
So Iunno, it doesn't seem as extremely profitable as my first calc, but it's still probably pretty profitable. And any improvement they make to the satellites over time just adds on top. (Also I don't think they actually have $50 million internal cost per launch.)
edit: Terminals "reportedly cost around $1000 to make" and are sold for $500, so nbd, subtract another 2 billion per customer-lifecycle.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg&feature=youtu.be
Looks to me that you forgot about the consumer-side terminal.
Can you tl;dw? I'm not watching 40 minutes of a video that has DEBUNKED in the title.
He also claims that its product offering brings nothing new to the table compared to hughesnet and viasat which is wrong imo as offering 1/10th latency of these products is a gamechanger.
Sorry, I'd do better but I'm on mobile, I think it's worth a watch at 1.5×
And yes, um, read comments on /r/starlink of people switching from Viasat. It's pretty unequivocal.
(I'd say "read comments on /r/viasat of people switching from Starlink too", but, well, all you can find on that sub is people switching to Starlink.)
Some examples:
- After lying about SpaceX launch costs, he later posts screenshots of articles. One of those articles had the true launch costs. The image was photoshopped to remove this launch cost.
- When posting pricing information for competitor services, he uses their lowest cost tiers for their highest cost service provision. He also falsely implies that SpaceX and other satellite providers are providing comparable services despite the latency difference. This is all part of his effort to mislead with regard to demand.
- When quoting speed test results, he uses outdated alpha information. He argues that speedtests would not improve, but at the time he posted the video the speed tests results did improve. He knew this. You can tell because he claims there is a government conspiracy to favor SpaceX for funding for rural internet. This reveals he knows that they qualified for this. Which reveals that he knows his speed test numbers are out of date.
- He lies about the number of launches SpaceX will have to do, double counting replacement launches. I might think these sort of things were an honest mistake, but the pattern of behavior is clear. Given any information, he distorts it and attempts to paint a bad narrative, going as far as photoshopping or proposing government conspiracies. It is obvious he did a great deal of research - so it is absurd to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to ignorance.
TL;DR - Watching that video will make you uninformed and delusional, not informed. It is not worth watching. The person who made it is not trustworthy. You are linking, not to a skeptic, but to an Elon Musk conspiracy theorist.
I'm familiar with the mobile satellite sector and I can say for a fact that he is right about the cost of the terminal being couple times higher than $500, though getting at the exact number would require a considerable amount of digging.
I got things to say about the attitude in this micro-thread though: I'm sure y'all heard the saying "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed". I like that quote, but I always felt like some elaboration should follow.
By all means, do watch/read/consume anything and everything, and first use introspection, ie. ask yourself "Am I qualified/informed/sane enough to reach a conclusion about this matter?", and if your answer is yes then use your critical thinking neurons to reach YOUR conclusion. Then still try to verify it with your peers, or if you can find any, experts in that particular field. Personal attacks (along with other logical fallacies) have no place in a civilised discussion.
Basing on the above, if the Starlink opposers are as desperate as you say about distorting the facts to advance their narrative, it only increases my confidence in the project. You see, I did not end up being delusional, just reached a logical conclusion to the extent of my abilities.
So all in all, thanks for taking the time to write this up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31486083&p=2#31487813
Read around and that thread a bit and you'll see that people confirmed my claims and that those who doubted it and checked his numbers themselves observed a three order of magnitude difference* in his cost estimation versus their estimate.
This isn't a source to get informed by, but one that makes you delusional.
Calculation fixed!
edit: I've put up a Guesstimate Model: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/20609
Here's some of my math:
* Each customer brings in $1.2k/year.
* Satellites have 20 gbps of bandwidth, and consumers today are reporting about 50 mbps links.
* Maximum capacity is then ~1000 customers/sat because a 50 mbps connection takes 100 mbps of capacity to run duplex, and you need to double that again because customer data needs to get to backhaul.
* Satellites will spend significant time over water, and even more time over people who aren't paying - remember, metro areas all have cheaper cable internet. I would give these ~10% capacity at most.
* Satellites have 5 year life, but some fraction of them fail early - let's say that averages to 4 year replacement, and that estimate is at the high end of Musk's original estimate.
* One satellite is capable of $1.2M annual revenue, assuming 100% utilization, or $5M revenue over its life.
* Satellites cost $250k to manufacture, and $1M to launch ($50M per launch of 50 sats, making the math simple). Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
* The profitability of a single satellite is heavily dependent on utilization: At 10% utilization, each satellite makes $500k of revenue over its life. Satellites have to run at 30% utilization to break even.
* Customers receive a ~$1k subsidy to access the network in terms of the discount on the dish. This means we have 1 year per customer to break even on the customer. Assuming 3 year customer/dish lifetime (and assuming we will subsidize dish replacements when they break), we have only ~$2k margin per customer over 3 years, or $700 per year amortized.
* Now, the per-satellite gross margin drops to around $3-3.5M. This means that you now need up to 50% utilization to break even on a satellite.
What this all means is that starlink, if it is ever profitable, will be profitable based on niche use cases where they can charge extremely high subscription prices. Use cases like airplanes, yachts, offshore oil platforms, and military deployments. Customers who aren't paying a lot per subscription are dead weight.
By making slightly different assumptions, we have dramatically different conclusions.
The biggest factor driving disagreement seems to be satellite lifetime. You also didn't account for oversubscription.
edit: Though-
> Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
How do you get that?! Starlink don't lose 30% of sats, lol.
Also, by my math, 5:1 oversubscribed is about breakeven, and it appears to be what Starlink does (reports of 10-50 mbps by users).
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRDM/iridium-commu...
Neither do Viasat’s:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VSAT/viasat/profit...
For some reason, Inmarsat has very nice profit margins though:
https://craft.co/inmarsat/metrics
Interesting that Viasat was able to purchase Inmarsat given the figures.
But yes, I did in fact assume it to be higher.
Viasat simply has near zero profit margins, and quite a few years with losses.
Inmarsat looks like it has 20% or so profit margin for the last few years, but I could not quickly find more years of data.
Also, I would expect decent (10%+) profit margins for a business with few customers and extremely costly barriers to entry. Both of those factors add to volatility, and investors would require a commensurate return to make it worth investing in.
They do make a good profit in the years they do, but my point is they also have quite a bit of volatility. I would not touch that business without the 10%+ profit margin opportunities.
Was just replying to the notion that this couldn't be artificial highway robbery just because their net margin isn't great. I believe it definitely still can be, because apparently the only way these companies are even in business right now is exactly by highway robbery.
If anything, it seems like the customers should feel lucky the investors are risking their money on this product/service, and it is being offered at all.
I believe they can still commit highway robbery even without their net margins being dramatically high, since highway robbery is exactly what you stated - charging too high a price for its products/services.
For high-bandwidth large-terminal, you have Inmarsat GX, Viasat and various other Ka and Ku band based providers; for safety of life you have Inmarsat and Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF); for land-based tracking, you have Globalstar and Iridium; for handheld telephony, you have Iridium, Inmarsat and Globalstar.
Notably, Starlink also does not look like it will be competing in any of these fields.
a note that part of the DoD iridium market where Iridium was previously the only ultra-high-latitude/polar coverage part is served by the DoD's own molniya orbit satellites which provide full polar coverage. the orbits of these are designed to be at apogee and long dwell time directly above high latitudes.
the DoD is still a big part of iridium's revenue stream in general of course.
it is not like they have an extreme profit margin between their actual operating cost and the cost that a chunk of dedicated 1:1 transponder kHz/MHz (or a whole 36 MHz transponder) can be sold to the end user.
I wouldn't be surprised if equipment and certification costs would dwarf the actual fee charged per month and user in these applications, and the market entry barrier in such highly regulated industries is usually enormous. (It took Iridium a long time to get SOLAS-certified, for example; before that, Inmarsat was the only solution besides HF radio.)
In the market of providing fast, non-safety-critical internet access to remote places however, my guess is that Starlink is going to shake up things significantly.
In some cases it might pay for itself in less than 1 month of service compared to the $/Mbps from the VSAT, using antenna hardware such as this and various vendors' choices of modems (and 3rd party VSAT ISPs that resell transponder kHz and operate teleports).
https://orbit-cs.com/maritime-satcom
Go price what it would cost for 1:1 dedicated monthly recurring billing to have 5 Mbps down x 1 Mbps up DIA service assigned to a medium sized maritime VSAT terminal that roams around the Gulf of Texas... Or even in a 5:1 or worse contended network.
What you'll see is the Iridium of course remains live and on the network and is used for critical voice calls and message and such, while the data network on the ship/offshore oil rig/whatever has a new better DIA path via starlink.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTEQ/intelsat-sa/...
SES SA is doing well, but only a couple years of data:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SGBAF/ses-sa/profi...
I was headhunted for a SRE position with Viasat last year due to my extensive Satcom background. I noped out as soon as I found out it was Viasat. Not because I dislike them personally, but because I don't want to be laid off next year.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat.
Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise - people just do without.
Starlink will change this game because of their drastically increased capacity (assuming they get sat-sat links working). Until another mega-constellation comes online I fully expect them to do to satellite Internet what they did to the launch market.
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.
the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.
It'd only work well outside, though.
There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult.
Of course, they could dedicate parts of their spectrum to "one sided beamforming" and compete with Iridium that way (no idea if the L-band has any other advantages over Ka when used like that).
the path loss and need for more gain at LEO satellite distance is considerably greater than talking about terrestrial cellphone networks in bands <2500 MHz.
I've been reading books on satellite communications and have some idea of all the technical terms you guys mentioned as well as relationship between 5g and phase array etc.
Where do you get your knowledge from regarding these issues in such detail? Do you guys work in this area? Are there any reading materials you recommend in this field that are relevant and updated to keep track of these tech?
And those require line of sight or be very close to them to achieve high speeds. That's why there is little incentive to provide them.
In MU-MIMO (available in newer versions of 802.11, for example), the base station transmits to and receives from multiple mobile devices that are located at different spatial angles. But in the mobile devices themselves, the gain from that steering is not high/fast enough to allow for multiple (relatively) fixed base stations in the same space.
In other words, a stationary/slowly moving antenna array on one side of the channel can target individual moving users due to angles changing slowly over time and the antenna array being quite sophisticated, but moving users with smaller antennas and angles varying over a much shorter period of time can't do the same.
Think about it: From a satellite's point of view, your angle varies much more slowly and predictably than the other way around, e.g. when taking a turn in a car or on a rocking boat (that's why high-gain antennas usually have to be gimbal-stabilized).
Starlink's orders of magnitude higher bandwidth, as far as I can tell, stems from requiring slowly and predictably changing angles on both sides, giving it m:n (relatively) independent spatial channels rather than just 1:n as is common for a one-sided omnidirectional approach. (That's also why Iridium and Globalstar wouldn't be able to scale significantly better in low-gain mobile-client applications by just launching more satellites.)
and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.
Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.
the constrained BOM is the very reason why the terminal cost is reasonable for this business. it's well known that SpaceX is selling the terminal at a huge loss to gather customers in the short term.
Or course you can achieve high speeds over geostationary if you throw entire transponders full of MHz at the problem. Which has a proportionally huge monthly recurring cost to control that transponder space. Or as a total percentage of the satellite's transponders dedicated to your network.
Yes satellite tx power from the twta is more powerful than it used to be. You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
> You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
16apsk has been used for about a decade now on GEO satellites. I'm not sure why the gateway size matters when we're talking about user speeds.
I note you didn't answer my question because you have no idea of what modulations, channel size and such are required to actually push 10Gbps through a satellite link to a single terminal. I think you're going off Viasat's marketing material where they're claiming aggregate throughput of an entire satellite or something.
Show me the exact hardware configuration of modems you think are capable of 10Gbps by geostationary and how much transponder MHz it needs.
I said if they wanted to they could sell a 10Gbps plan, because that's what the link budget allows. they don't, of course, because it's not profitable. SpaceX also could in theory, do that, but they also don't. your original claim is that SpaceX somehow has far greater bandwidth to an area than Geo is patently false.
> the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
if your definition of economically viable is getting VC money and government subsidies pumped in so that someone else other than the subscriber is paying for the service, then I agree with you. but that's not the metric most people use when they discuss being profitable
Not if they have to replace 100's of satelites due to their 4 years life spawn.
There are videos showing calculations and how crazy starlink is from business perspective. Money doesn't add up in long term.
I can tell you what the latency is on fiber from the Redmond or North bend Earth stations to downtown seattle, and it's minuscule. Same as if a person was a customer on a docsis3 or GPON network in Redmond.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1415480145830465539?t=O9...
If you recall there was non-stop chatter about how HFT would be using Starlink because the latency was so low, or that it would replace fiber because the latency would be lower. It was all fake. The latency will be 30-40ms nominally for most users. That's great (it's just okay for LEO) for satellite, but let's not pretend it's anywhere near what the goal was.
If you look at the per cpe traffic charts for each of the 32 customers on your typical 32:1 oversubscribed GPON connection, each individual one doesn't move that much traffic at all, relative to a chart that's scaled to 1Gbps on the Y axis.
With very basic CWDM you can push a ridiculous amount of data through just one strand of good sm fiber.
Docsis3/3.1 cable internet is worse because it's reliant on asymmetric use of downstream rf channels and much more limited bandwidth in the coax (though, they do still achieve 2048 and 4096qam!)
If you have a very small piece of rf spectrum like some tiny fraction of one 36MHz satellite transponder and you then oversubscribe it 32:1 or worse and also have to use fairly rudimentary loose modulations (very poor bps/Hz compared to terrestrial wired line modulations) at geostationary link budget distance, yeah, it's gonna suck.
It's more like, imagine you had fifteen people with laptops all connected to a single 802.11n AP from 12 years ago and you're all trying to torrent the latest 5GB debian install iso at the same time.
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
IIRC Viasat has been especially active in trying everything they can to throw up regulatory hurdles and slow down Starlink deployment.
It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
You have LEO stuff like Iridium that is targeted at pocket-sized terminals at very low bandwidth
You have GEO stuff like Sky Muster with large, fixed dishes, high latency and decent bandwidth
Then you have Starlink with large, fixed dishes, low latency and high bandwidth
Companies like Viasat, Iridium and the others will have a very, very hard time ever competing in the LEO space.
Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative. I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.
Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.
Naively, cost+speed+coverage=value?
"Tesla production up 87% year-on-year!"
"But what about Cybertruck, Roadster, and Semi? Fail."