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To be fair, a non vertically integrated geostationary-satellite-owning company like intelsat, ses, eutelsat or arabsat or similar has little to no control over how much Boeing charges for a fully equipped 702 series satellite bus, or the disposable rocket launch costs.

It’s incredible to behold. Can you imagine either being a satellite comms service provider or space vehicle provider trying to acquire or raise capital to acquire your compliment to vertically integrate and reap higher margins? You’ll get laughed out of the board room or the investment bank office. And instead, SpaceX knocks it out if the park with reusability such that they say to themselves (or rather, Musk tells the board) “well, we’re about to cannibalize the launch market and we’re running out of TAM, can we launch our own satellite constellation and consume another TAM with these F9s we’ve got laying around not being productive?”

geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.

I'm just going to throw some numbers out here.

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.

I came across this guy recently:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg&feature=youtu.be

Looks to me that you forgot about the consumer-side terminal.

Yeah they make a loss on it, but probably not a huge one. Call it half a year to a year of fees.

Can you tl;dw? I'm not watching 40 minutes of a video that has DEBUNKED in the title.

He claims the terminal costs at least 3× the retail price and will never make a profit because of it

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×

Of course the terminals will not make a profit, they're a loss leader.

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.)

Your source is a liar.

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.

You're wasting your time arguing with a TSLAQ idiot. They will just ignore all your facts and keep spreading lies. I bet they also use Jenny McCarthy as the source for their vaccine information.

plq is a messaging geek, a bike mechanic, and a human. They aren't an idiot and after my message they did not defend their source.

When I brought this video up, I just wanted to provide a voice from the other side of the debate. I did not really verify its contents and wanted to hear what other people had to say about it.

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.

Very bad source. I go into why in more detail in this comment, but to keep it short: his numbers are lies and he knows it too - some of his screenshots are photoshopped to preserve his narrative. He has an agenda - an anti-Elon Musk agenda - and has no intellectual integrity.

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.

Do you mean 1000$ / mo? Because at 100$ / mo, your calculations seem to be off by 10?

Yes, dumb mistake, fixed. Still looks good but no longer quite so implausibly good.

I might be misunderstanding you, but $100/mo is $1.2k/y not $12k/y.

Okay, so I'm an idiot. That explains a lot.

Calculation fixed!

I can't edit anymore, so correction: Current sats only have 6y lifespan, which drops us to 1.3 billion yearly, but I think that's partially cause they're still iterating on them. It seems clear that satellite lifespan is the main factor for profit.

edit: I've put up a Guesstimate Model: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/20609

That is such a cool site; thank you for sharing it.

This calculation illustrates the problems of subtracting a big number from another big number.

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.

See my model over at https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/20609

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.

It's a round number, and assumes about 10% loss. But also, they can't make or launch the sats for $1.25 million each yet, so it might not be a bad number.

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).

Just to note, 5:1 oversubscription wouldn't give you 10-50mbps unless everyone was using the connection at full rate at once. That's why (quick google) DSL services often oversubscribe by up to a 100:1.

thanks. couldn't have said it better

This is SpaceX, not Tesla, unless I'm misreading your comment.

Thank you, I miswrote.

Iridium’s profit margins do not seem like those of a company engaging in artificial highway robbery:

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.

I would argue that 25% or so net margin for a decade is a pretty significant sign considering how small their customer base must be and how much expenses they must have.

But yes, I did in fact assume it to be higher.

I see a lot of volatility for Iridium with quite a few years with big losses and zero profit.

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.

Iridium apparently had much more expenses for a few years around 2018, possibly mass upgrading their infrastructure, but before that a decade of near constant 20-30% net, recovering again now, unless I'm misreading this data.

The Mar 31, 2022 datapoint is -0.21%.

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.

Definitely agree, I probably wouldn't touch them at this point any more at all.

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.

I cannot agree with that characterization. How can a business be a suboptimal or undesirable investment because it does not earn enough profit relative to risk, and simultaneously be committing highway robbery (i.e. charging too high a price for its products/services)?

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 think there's a misunderstanding. I noted that I wouldn't see these businesses as a good investment any more because of SpaceX and further developments.

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.

Charging "too high a price" is only possible in a monopoly position. Would you argue that any satellite provider has one, at the moment?

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.

> Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF)

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.

the price looks like highway robbery from the POV of an end user purchaser of "internet by satellite" from a geostationary company, but they do also have extreme operating costs. a company like eutelsat or ses has extreme amounts of funds going out for purchasing satellites and launch services.

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.

Iridium (and to some extent Inmarsat) are currently in an almost completely different market than Starlink is: They provide safety-of-life certified solutions for maritime, aviation and military customers.

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.

Large and serious budget offshore applications these days will of course have an Iridium terminal live and on the network, and also a geostationary based VSAT of some sort. Something such as Starlink is meant to take market share from the VSAT.

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.

Viasat while it has a lot of consumer facing exposure (and contracts to do things like build teleports for the DoD) is not a major player in the market of actually owning geostationary satellites. Look at entities like Intelsat and SES.

Intelsat’s numbers look horrible, and Wikipedia says they recently filed for bankruptcy:

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...

Several years ago I ensured that nothing in my 401k and other retirement savings plans has any exposure to geostationary owner stock.

Make sure Energy Vault (NRGV) is not in there either.

I did the same as soon as Starlink launched. I saw it as an existential threat it is to all the Geo operators.

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.

Without going into too much detail I know someone who was headhunted for Telesat's proposed LEO network (too late, too low budget, too little technical clue) and ran away quickly once he had an idea of what he would be getting into.

in terms of bandwidth they own more than all those others. it doesn't matter how many satellites you have if the capacity of each is tiny.

you can't really compare iridium to purely geostationary operators as a business model, however, something LEO based that support very small L/S-band modems and handheld size terminals, embedded modems is very different than a company that only owns C/Ku/Ka band geostationary satellites and makes most of its revenue from selling transponder kHz.

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.

The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity.

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 was the first network to successfully operate inter-satellite links more than 20 years ago. I wouldn't call it "considerably less advanced".

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.

Iridium was a marvel of engineering no-doubt but Starlink as a constellation is in a different league entirely.

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.

big difference also is that iridium was designed from the outset to address handheld size customer terminals like an original iridum 9505 phone, starlink is something that needs a considerably larger fixed phased array. rf laws of physics being what they are I don't see a ku/ka-band starlink handheld phone or anything similar to the iridium L/S-band hockey puck sized antennas any time soon.

the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.

Starlink has plenty of room for increasing their antenna size on the satellite size to something that a handheld could use. I was surprised how small the phased array on the sat side is. Increase that to make it similar to the size of the satellite (not counting solar array) and with the larger v2 satellites, and they'd have much more gain (allowing the handheld antenna to be smaller). They essentially already use 5G bandwidth.

It'd only work well outside, though.

Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection?

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).

Modern cellphones with 5G (and wifi, etc) do beamforming already.

Not in the same way that a flat panel phased array that maintains a fixed angle and aim at the sky can.

Actually in exactly the same way. The nice thing about phased arrays is they steer electronically, so you can aim them extremely fast and compensate for any movement. That's how 5G works and that's also how Starlink on moving vehicles works.

a flat panel phased array still has considerably more gain in the direction it's aimed, vs a randomly oriented omnidirectional (physical) antenna in a phone. i can guarantee you starlink doesn't work well when the array elements aren't aimed correctly in the general direction of where the satellites are.

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.

5G phones already use a flat panel phased array, just with fewer elements (and less gain, but that can be compensated by using a lot more elements on the satellite side and by operating at much lower bandwidth). And yes, I understand the difference between lower frequencies and higher. 5G can also use lower frequencies but the main bandwidth advantage (over LTE/etc) is in the higher frequency, the mm-wave, roughly 25-50GHz, a frequency band that overlaps that used by the Starlink phased arrays.

Sorry to interject between two people who clearly know what their talking about.

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?

>the mm-wave, roughly 25-50GHz, a frequency band that overlaps that used by the Starlink phased arrays.

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.

5G and Wi-Fi don't use MIMO for terminal side spatial multiplexing though, as far as I know.

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.)

If it's 20 years older with orders of magnitude less bandwidth, I can see why someone might call it less advanced.

this is completely incorrect. viasat's technology is far more advanced than starlink. just because it's not LEO doesn't mean it's simple.

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.

The end results of the link budgets required for geostationary to low cost consumer grade terminals means that now matter how good viasat's tech is, the end result is going to be mediocre. Have you actually lived on the far end of a consumer grade highly contended oversubscribed ku/ka band vsat terminal?

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.

I've had their service for 4 years straight in the past. it's not as good as cable, but it's nowhere near as bad as you say if you're not playing real time games.

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.

Even if viasat's consumer service was handing out high quality steel 1.8 meter elliptical offset ku band dishes with norsat PLL LNBs and 8W BUCs to consumers, 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.

that's simply not true. they have transponders that should deliver 10Gbps to a single user IF they were willing to pay for both the service and terminal. SpaceX is limited in the exact same way, and their terminals + satellite costs are much higher for the number of them.

10Gbps to a single terminal using exactly what modulation and code rate, and channel size?

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.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. starlink is also multiple smaller beams within a single beam for frequency reuse. a single beam does not get more bandwidth (in Gbps) than a viasat terminal.

> 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.

If you don't understand why in a geostationary based link, the antenna size at either end matters a great deal for overall link budget, gain, Eb/No and what modulation you can use at a certain MCS and code rate before it gets too blurry in a QAM eyeball chart, there's no sense in talking about satellite communications with you.

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 literally just said that 16APSK has been used for a decade on Geo satellites. I don't know if you aren't aware what modulation means, but that is the modulation. it does not matter at all what size the gateway or the user antenna is. 16APSK (actually 32APSK is used as well) and the carrier size tells you all you need to know about the speeds, unless you've never done a link budget or worked in this industry.

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

> SpaceX’s going to have a field day and brutally rip some inflated executives out of their cozy decade-old comfort zone.

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.