SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up with 1M | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up with 1M

arstechnica.com

29 pointslxm59 comments

I'm sure it will get to 20M paying customers, eventually. But most of the inhabited planet is well served by terrestrial 4G/LTE. And the places that don't have terrestrial mobile service are also largely unpopulated. It's great for ships, but that's still in the 100k range. The Russia/Ukraine war has proved its effectiveness. But that is still just 1000s of terminals.

In every instance where Starlink could be more usable than terrestrial we're talking a few million at most.

2500+250/mo is steep for the marine use device , especially when a lot of emergency-use data equivalents will charge you by the byte -- which makes the devices make good sense to have aboard but never used.

I know of a lot of mariners that would probably bite at Starlink if an equivalent pay-as-you-need service was offered,even with the pricey equipment.

Starlink has what you speak of and any price StarLink offers is cheaper per KB regardless

There are “more than 100,000” Starlink terminals in Ukraine according to the new Musk bio.

Also, Musk yanking the plug on an active operation does not bode well for that sort of use case.

Except that’s not what happened. Starlink was not active in Crimea at the time because the US had sanctions in Crimea. He got a request from the Ukrainian government. He has stated if he got a request from the US government he would have activated it.

That can be solved by legislation if necessary.

What's the bandwidth on 4G? Not a telecomms engineer, but data service can be very pricey, so I assumed it was kind of a limited resource.

So, in a presentation from 2015, SpaceX predicted 20M users by 2022, and they missed the mark. This was a presentation to investors, to drum up support for their plans. Subscriber numbers are still increasing. This seems like a case of being a bit late on a optimistic prediction about a massive 7 year undertaking.

I've never heard of a serious investor that takes these numbers without a teaspoon of salt. I think the total addressable market is generally a bigger concern. At this point, it looks like Starlink is likely to own the whole market (of high-ish bandwidth, low-ish latency internet in remote-ish places). No one else is even close for the necessary launch cadence to maintain a very LEO satellite fleet.

Posted to HN using a Starlink connection.

They missed by 95%, can't say that's a great call, can you?

>This was a presentation to investors, to drum up support for their plans

Isn't that the issue, though?

This is why startups are only allowed to raise from "accredited investors" and not the general public. The fact that whatever technology they claimed to have at the time worked and wasn't a true fraud when pitched is really all that matters. Anything forward looking is a projection the investors can choose to believe or not.

They are behind on their projections from 2015, aboutt what would be achieved 7 years later in 2022. How many business plans that are to be executed over a 7 period hit the mark? I wonder if you hold everyone, every business to such a high standard? Or is their something you dislike about SpaceX?

My opinion what SpaceX has achieved with starlink is super impressive . Sure they are behind schedule, but have achieved so much. They are no longer losing money on their dishes. They have launched thousands of satellites. Their subscriber count is rapidly increasing.

Feb 2021: 10k subscribers Jan 2022: 145k May 2022: 400k May 2023: 1.5 million

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/spacex-starlink-internet-ser... https://starlinkinsider.com/starlink-surpasses-1-5-million-s... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/25/spacexs-starlink-surpasses-4...

> missed by 95%, can't say that's a great call, can you?

Yes. They’re within an order of magnitude. On the north side of zero. That’s a good prediction, particularly given the 20mm user figure seems realistic.

You cannot say with a straight face that predicting 20 million users, getting only 1 million, is "a good prediction".

> cannot say with a straight face that predicting 20 million users, getting only 1 million, is "a good prediction"

Yes, I can. Especially when the prediction is ten years hence and made about a product that doesn’t exist predicated on a launch frequency nobody has attained. 1mm users means core leaps in launch frequency, beam shaping, operations and sales came together. Furthermore, sitting at the deadline, the 20mm isn’t unrealistic. For hard technology venture, that’s a good prediction. (A lot of tech meets its order of magnitude threshold only to learn the goal is unrealistic, ever.) Not spectacular. But also not bad.

Within an order of magnitude would be 2M users. This is not within an order of magnitude.

> This is not within an order of magnitude

10^6 vs 2 x 10^7. An order of magnitude. Order of magnitude isn’t literally divide by ten. Granted, there is a qualitative difference between 1 to 10mm and 1 to 99mm, but they’re both one order of magnitude apart.

Thanks!

just because investors have the presumption that presentations are lies and founders have the incentive to lie during the presentation doesn't somehow warp reality into thinking that prediction was a good one.

It may have constituted a good business decision to lie during presentation day, but whether or not that's true is wholly independent of the state and accuracy of the prediction itself; that prediction sucked.

Starlink will no doubt turn into a money printing machine very soon. The war in Ukraine has proven it has a ton of value as a military communication system.

Too bad it ruined the sky for the 15K professional astronomers out there and a big part of the millions of amateurs as well.

Not sure about this - seems like Elon's personal meddling has shown that Starlink is not reliable for military purposes. Military would have to have complete ownership/control

They are building a US-military controlled one called Starshield.

The US doesn't have any current plans for military version of Starlink. They have a pretty extensive satellite system. Starshield is SpaceX project to use Starlink technology for military.

The US Space Development Agency, focused on missile defense, is working with SpaceX on tracking and communications constellations. But the communications is using laser links for in-space communications. Military Starlink is possible but not proposed yet.

What "meddling" are you talking about?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/elon-musk-bi...

Walter Isaacson, the book's author, gave a long-form interview recently on The Lex Fridman podcast. In case you'd like to form your own opinion about the book's legitimacy, its writing/Musk-supported research is substantially discussed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOV5R7M1Js

Musk has since stated that the satellites were always disabled in the Crimea, as per requirements of US sanctions, and that SpaceX would have turned things on if requested by the American government, but no such request was made. Is he lying?

Articles claims have been retracted

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/08/elon-musk...

>A senior Ukrainian official has accused Elon Musk of “committing evil” after a new biography revealed details about how the business magnate ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships.

What you think Elon did with regards to Ukraine is almost certainly incorrect.

> Too bad it ruined the sky for the 15K professional astronomers out there and a big part of the millions of amateurs as well.

Checkout the latest updates on the new sats, the problem has been fixed.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-more-astronomy-photobombs-spac...

The article doesn't say that it's been fixed, merely there's a new attempt to lessen the issue that is being tested with the latest batch (which were still easily visible by eye via earth bound observers).

I think they meant to post a different link. The latest satellites are dimmer than 7 apparent magnitude (meeting the AAS recommendation) despite being 4x larger.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06657

Kessler syndrome is inevitable once low-cost access to space is unlocked. At least we'll get to browse cat memes from an airplane out of it.

This has nothing to do with kessler syndrome; these satellites will all necessarily deorbit a relatively short period after their fuel supplies are exhausted and they're no longer able to correct for the orbital degradation caused by the atmosphere.

Somewhat tangential: Can you imaging having to come up with a price point involving the planned destruction of millions, if not billions of dollars of assets every few years?

They cost about 250,000 each from what I read. If the constellation is 10K satellites that is 2.5 billion every 5 years. If revenue is $80 per month per subscriber, you need about half million subscribers to break even.

This doesn't include launch costs, but starship is supposed to minimize that further. Add in other overhead, then 1 million subscribers is well within spitting distance of break even.

Low cost access to space also implies low(er) cost cleanup of defunct satellites and other debris.

The war in Ukraine has proven that starlink or a private company shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to military operations.

It's proven that you get what you pay for

Did the dark paint have no effect?

They recently started launching highly reflective satellites, which counterintuitively reduces the amount of light scattered in earth's direction.

The dark paint was a stupid idea, that never realized.

>The company developed a highly reflective dielectric mirror film and a low-reflectivity black paint, which are applied to several parts of the spacecraft body. The mirror-like surface reflects sunlight into space instead of scattering it toward observers on the ground. In addition, the solar panels can be oriented so that observers do not see their sunlit sides.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-newest-and-la...

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37505168

Now over 2 million active customers

https://twitter.com/Starlink/status/1705695980325323023

It does seem like there is an upper bound on Starlink's success given that terrestrial gigabit fiber exists in major markets. Maybe they have a plan for this?

Yes, their plan is to serve the hundreds and hundreds of millions of people around the globe who don't have access to terrestrial gigabit fiber.

Most of that population can't afford Starlink prices.

That's also why I'm suspicious of the long term profitability of the whole thing. Most developed countries where the customers are richer also have some pretty good infrastructure and the rest likely couldn't afford the expensive service.

You are then left with all the exceptions to those general rules and I'm not sure that's enough to cover the very expensive cost of the platform.

Long term I wonder if they'll encourage sharing terminals. Like a Starlink terminal that's a cellular base station.

I think they will be successful, but it seems like terrestrial internet will always have a significant bandwidth (though not latency) advantage over Starlink.

> but it seems like terrestrial internet will always have a significant bandwidth (though not latency) advantage over Starlink.

Starlink was never designed to compete with terrestrial internet in any way.

If you have access to good high speed internet already then Starlink is not for you.

I thought starlink has poor and inconsistent latency?

theoretically the latency can beat terrestrial fiber through space laser links

If they have money to pay, and there is demand from them most of those will get it. Or just get something like 4G/5G.

[dupe]

More discussions over here a week ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37505168

Reply on news.ycombinator.com