Good for them. Bringing production costs from $3000 per terminal in 2020(?) to $1300 in early 2021 to less than $600 now is quite the achievement, and not subsidizing terminals will make rapid expansion a lot cheaper.
And as they improve the cost of terminals, there’s no fundamental limit in the amount of capacity for a given frequency allocation. Geometric multiplexing is only limited by the number and cost of the phased array elements.
So rapid expansion everywhere.
And then launching the full sized v2 Starlink satellites on Starship will account for another ~2-2.5x increase in size compared to the v2 minis. Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled.
So they have about a factor of 100 capacity expansion in the pipeline, and they can increase the satellite size even further due to Starship’s low costs. They can expand a lot, even in existing countries. Lots of people are on waiting lists due to capacity being filled up in many regions.
SpaceX has launched just under 5,100 Starlink satellites to orbit, of which a single digit percentage have either been deorbited for testing, failure, solar storm knocking them out, etc. Their current constellation total size is approved to be around 12,000 satellites. They've been working to get additional approvals up to 42,000 satellites.
Wow. When I was a kid, we would steal "ELN" accounts for dial-up and then hop on to AOL via TCP/IP.
Edit: we did that so when we got punted we didn't have to go throigh the whole dial-up sequence. Which happened a lot in those days if you were twelve years old.
We went from Wild Blue internet, which was garbage all around, for $120/mo to a full gig fiber connection locked in at $80/mo for life. It cost us $200 to hook it up.
More and more rural isp's are getting into fiber with grants.
Ironically, in doing this, I have managed to meet and convince a project manager of a new ISP to add our neighborhood to the list to places to pull fiber to, but it will likely be about a year out.
It will like not beat earth bound stuff in many scenarios, but it will be closer then it was in the past.
The emergency texting is also 2-way.
"Once you’re connected, your iPhone starts a text conversation with emergency responders by sharing critical information [...]
You might be asked to respond to additional messages. Only Latin characters (such as English or French) are supported in these messages. [...]"
The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks
Had a similar issue when living in SF
Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small cities, only have one (crappy) vendor
I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there’s definitely a market for them in well established, densely populated areas in rich countries
With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo.
I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
Example:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-jun...
Beware the murder hornets!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-was...
Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59559/how-long-can...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7
That was always the thinking of all kinds of pollution that they are insignificant, till it "suddenly" became a problem and "everyone" was surprised.
Well, if you're convinced it's inevitable then it is.
Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas.
If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined".
Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km.
If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there.
0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic.
It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.
He's the driving force behind some of the greatest innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt many people can say they've had greater impact or could withstand the same scrutiny.
The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g. taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to drive engagement.
for example I really like tom cruise as an actor, one of my personal top 10, but I don't like what he is doing in his private life (the cult thing). so what i'm doing is separating things and take what I like, and ignore (to some extent) what I don't like.
I feel like you guys take things way to serious, and expect everything to be perfect, which is not possible.
Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to repeatedly commit securities fraud.
Expansion will happen in all direction at the same time, in all market. In very poor country a single village might share one antenna. All the way to very expensive antennas for military aircraft.
Another possibility is distributing costs by using Starlink as backhaul. India for example already has very cheap high speed mobile data, so a telecom company could spread out the costs of terminals and service (maybe even get a better deal for bulk usage) while simplifying and strengthening their own infrastructure for remote or disaster-prone areas.
Plus, for SpaceX, any point where a satellite is inactive is money left on the table, so they should have significant price flexibility for places which can't afford the current service fees but can afford something that is more than the cost of bandwidth at the downlink station.
Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can afford to advertise way more than before. If they can pick up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever that's worth).
For example, China claims:
There's a reason why the comments are mentioning rural US, because it's a clear outlier among the developped world.
When people are richer, they also tend to live in countries where the internet access is very important to the state and where installing good internet is an important public policy.
Of course you have exceptions to that general case but I'm not convinced those exceptions are enough by themselves.
They are in a very different market than a traditional product, they are basically servicing the people that nobody else want to service and the distribution of revenue in that group is going to be drastically different from the norm.
The only way to have satellite in an tall apartment building is to put it on the roof, which is complicated.
They have a long, long way to go before even talking about developing countries which already are densely populated and mostly have fast, cheap internet already.