Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Business aviation (i.e. "private jets") has exactly the type of customer for whom being able to make phone calls in-air is a thing where cost is secondary.
Gogo even pivoted to that market entirely [1], with the commercial segment now part of Intelsat.
- Nobody other than Starlink is offering anything at all to end customers; all alternatives are in GEO, which means much higher latencies.
- There's no alternative to Iridium when it comes to reliable, 100% global coverage in the L-band (except if you're the military, presumably). Planes and ships are still carrying HF radios for redundancy in high latitudes.
- Nobody, neither GEO nor LEO, other than Starlink, currently offers high-throughput connectivity for in-flight connectivity. (Inmarsat is planning to launch HEO satellites for the northern hemisphere, which will possibly extend their existing aviation coverage there.)
- OneWeb does compete for high-throughput services in LEO in the Ku-band (requiring steered antennas just like Starlink), but doesn't seem to be offering inter-satellite links yet, i.e. no global coverage alternative for airlines either.
https://www.nasa.gov/headquarters/library/find/bibliographie...
In terms of independent operators, not so much. If Starlink goes down or ceases operations in a given region or to a given customer, there are few alternatives right now.
These satellites are generally low enough tha their orbits decay after a couple years if they don't boost themselves, and then they burn up in the atmosphere.
I wonder if there is a market for worldwide coverage with fast data without the capacity for broadband users. That would lower the number and capacity of satellites.
Alternatively, it might be possible to do broadband with larger but fewer satellites instead of Starlink strategy of increasing capacity with more satellites. Other companies could save money by not having laser links and only do bent pipe.
They already know they can't compete on merit alone, so they'll go for lobbying and regulatory intervention so they can "compete".
Geostationary is a 44,000 mile round trip. So a request/response for a packet is 90,000 miles. Already at 1/2 of a second latency without any actual networking because of the speed of light. And that is if you are on the equator. Another tenth or two is probably lost at middle latitudes, and worse for higher latitudes. So in practical situations, your latency is a second or more.
And they can only put one satellite in one position, higher power to send the signal, no cheap way to replace/upgrade the satellite, single point of failure.
They cannot compete with a flotilla of low orbit satellites providing multiple powers of 10 better total bandwidth. Especially since Starlink has demonstrated it can communicate with current mobile phones.
If you don't care as much about latency (and many applications don't, e.g. asset tracking, news broadcasting or forwarding etc.), GEO is still very viable.
Are you sure about that? High-throughput LEO inevitably requires steering (whether electronic or mechanical), while high-throughput GEO is possible using a one-time adjusted dish, at least to station-kept satellites (which all HTS these days are, as far as I know).
For mobile applications, steering is obviously required for both, so there GEO has less of an advantage.
The Starlink dish is quite expensive, and I'm not sure if it's really sold at cost or whether there's some subsidy baked in (since it's only usable with their service anyway).
More complicated, yes, but produced at much, much higher volume. That is critical. A (year by year even more) niche market for applications that are ok with high latency, low-ish bandwidth and are stationary will not support proper volume production. Meanwhile the biggest LEO operators will building potentially millions of units.
If you only care about low bandwidth, with LEO you potentially don't even need a satellite terminal e.g look at starlink Direct to Cell, the physics about steering matter less in the case of low bandwidth since you can run a separate service on different frequencies with better radio characteristics.
There's big money in commercial aviation and shipping connectivity (Intelsat is effectively the successor of Gogo inflight wireless for many US airlines), to say nothing of government/military contracts.
Offering a Starlink competitor not subject to the whims of a somewhat notorious CEO might just be a compelling value proposition to some parties.
Don't forget that without the US DOD as a customer, Iridium would have been deorbited less than a year after its original satellite launches!
Similar to what has been happening recently with the FCC's rural broadband program - where Starlink, in my view, is likely being punished by the government for Musk's outspokenness.
It's far more than just "outspokenness"
I agree that for governmental decision making his behavior hasn't reached a level I think it can or should affect the process. That said, I'm not sure the process should be completely devoid of past regulatory or legal compliance issues, but I don't know how those could be applied evenly, and in the absence of a good framework for that I agree they shouldn't be considered.
I would be personally pissed as a rural broadband user if machinations about a conflict in Eastern Europe was the reason I was getting subpar telecom service in Tennessee.
> Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/par...
Blocking or unexpectedly rug-pulling a US-funded military strike against someone that the US is sanctioning certainly counts as "aid" to an "enemy".
So, he should be looking at 5 years + a $10,000 fine or get the death penalty.
Either way, I'm hoping we won't have to deal with a presidential run from him in the future ("... obama, kenya, ... something, something...")
Your criteria for accusing someone of treason is ridiculous and I am thankful you are not in charge of our government.
To many parties concerned about very high availability, (geo)politics are ultimately just another source of risk, and I think it's fair to say that Elon isn't known for being a de-risking factor, political or otherwise.
For example, what happens to Starlink when SpaceX, for whatever reason, decides to rededicate its launch capacity to other projects? Cheap launch capacity is the lifeblood of the Starlink constellation (the satellites are designed to be replaced much more frequently than other LEO competitors' such as Iridium or Globalstar).
As a government other than the US, are you sure your contracts that might compel SpaceX to deliver that launch capacity (assuming you managed to get them in the first place) are ironclad? Do you have the deep pockets and political will for an inter-jurisdictional lawsuit?
Just betting a few chips on a competitor, even if they're less viable than Starlink, just seems like prudent risk mitigation (and I say that as a fan of what Starlink is doing!)
Yes, competition is good.
> Elon isn't known for being a de-risking factor, political or otherwise.
The government should not be awarding contracts because it 'de-risks' them politically. They should be writing better contracts for the specific thing they want.
Speech-conditioned funding is clearly afoul of the 1st amendment and related precedent, even if you dress it up in 'de-risking' language. And, as a society, we have to be very wary of how we run contract processes because this is one of the easiest ways for corruption to get its foot in the door.
> As a government other than the US
I've clearly been speaking from the perspective of the US this whole time (and the US clearly does have the pockets). Most other countries don't even really have free speech protections like the US does, so their problems are deeper.
> SpaceX, for whatever reason, decides to rededicate its launch capacity to other projects?
Violation of contract? Most of these competitors are using SpaceX launch capacity as well - given that it is 90% of all launch capacity globally.
Lawsuits take time and money, and I think having a slightly higher-orbit LEO constellation under independent operational control could provide a fallback that many governments and commercial customers would be willing to pay good money for.
> Most of these competitors are likely using SpaceX launch capacity as well
That's a fair point, but there are ultimately alternatives, even if they might be non-competitive in terms of cost right now. It'd ultimately only be a backup, after all.
> Speech-conditioned funding is clearly afoul of the 1st amendment and related precedent
I was thinking primarily non-US government customers, so the first amendment has no bearing there. I'm pretty sure that the DOD has better ways to compel Elon to not shut off Starlink than e.g. the EU or an Asian government, so to them, that redundancy is probably less valuable.
This matters for the US because of the strong free speech protections here. Most EU countries & most Asian countries do not have similar strength of protections.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-sha...
The US government never had a contract with Starlink for Ukraine war usage. It does not seem to me like a reasonable expectation that a civilian company provide services for conducting a foreign war - nor that they be punished in unrelated contracts for refusing to do so.
Companies are permissibly allowed to be run by actors with political interests. By contrast, the government should not be making contracting decisions for political/speech reasons.
To me it is clear that we are returning to the politics of the 20th century (ie. flexing regulatory arms to punish speech/actions we don't like). It makes sense - we really only had a brief respite from that from the 90s until ~2016 or so.
Public IPv6 seems to be available on all plans now, according to the same article.
Together with DDNS, that should probably be good enough for many applications.
Dude is a walking scandal machine. They make bumper stickers for tesla owners apologizing for Musk's behavior. His behavior is listed in the risk category for at least one of his company's financial filings.
Only the most extremely tech oriented people see him as something other that extremely toxic.
Other than that he
* kept twitter running on a staff 1/5 the size
* created the only high speed internet that is available globally
* has completely taken over the EV market. I don't agree with the FSD stuff, that is killing people.
The most salient political controversy he has wandered into his "defense" of free speech, which has largely consisted of platforming neo-Nazis and transphobes while kicking off people who report on him kicking off someone who ran an account tracking the movements of his public plane and filing SLAPP suits against those who committed the heinous crime of making him look bad.
Beyond that, he has engaged in the standard tech-bro stance of it's-unconstitutional-for-the-government-to-do-anything-to-me (his attempts to flout California's covid lockdowns, e.g., or his more recent attempts to declare the NLRB and SEC unconstitutional agencies because they ruled against his companies).
> * kept twitter running on a staff 1/5 the size
In my subjective experience, Twitter quality has collapsed, and most of the people I'm interested in following have left the platform altogether. Also, he's trying his best to rebrand it to "X", which is such a smashing success that every commentary has to at least refer to it was "X (formerly Twitter)" and in many cases, people (such as you) don't bother to attempt to refer to it by its new name.
> * created the only high speed internet that is available globally
It's not officially available in Russia, I believe, so hardly "globally". Oh, it's also not available in Antarctica, which is another place with very crappy internet service.
> * has completely taken over the EV market. I don't agree with the FSD stuff, that is killing people.
Much less than "completely taken over", Tesla is no longer the largest seller of EVs, now that BYD has eclipsed it.
None of that addresses his sanity or his fallacies ( wants lower taxes -> Trump and is dependent on China too much -> Tesla is the only solely owned foreign company in China as far as I'm aware).
Wether Tesla's dependency on China is a good thing, is starting to play out now... And it seems it was not.
I find it highly unlikely this is true, will try to think of a counter example in a bit (cargill)
Also tesla is public?
> In ‘88, Cargill enters mainland China with a joint venture with Shandong Supply and Marketing Cooperative, and China International Trust and Investment Corporation. Together, they build a cottonseed crushing plant in Shandong, which begins operations in April 1990.
Related to Tesla. It's been overtaken by BYD, electric vehicle sales numbers are dropping. China is taking it's tech, seems to get their FSD tech relatively soon ( at least in license).
Share price doesn't reflect a successful business decision or not.
Not taking away the wonder of creating a car company on your own, that's nuts what he did there though.
For government this is more of a reason.
But they aren't the first to think of the 'be the best Nr.2 strategy'. There are already multiple companies trying to do exactly that. Including Amazon, OneWeb and many others.
And arguable, many of those are better position then SES too.
>It became a private company in 2001, then went public in 2013 before filing for bankruptcy in 2020.
Definitely agree about it sounding stodgy.
I’ve also had starlink but it was relatively early days and even though the speed and latency were great, every time there wasn’t a satellite cluster in view the internet would drop out for up to 15 seconds at a time. Also Viasat seemed to work even if it was cloudy if I remember correctly but starlink did not.
The thing that struck me is that they operated more like real-estate investors than tech companies. Geostationary satellite technology had remained largely unchanged for a couple decades, so these companies were engaged in the business of:
- Obtaining real estate (an orbital slot) - Putting a big, expensive, largely commoditized[1] asset on that real estate - Operating that asset as efficiently as possible to achieve a good ROI
This meant that the executives were often stronger at things like financing hundred-million dollar purchasing projects (a huge skill on its own) and running a skeleton technical operations staff (to keep OpEx down), but lacked the foresight to see what the Internet meant for their product relevance.
1: Of course something as technically complex as a spacecraft isn't a commodity, but there was largely no differentiator in what it _did_: receiving, shifting, and re-transmitting analog RF signals, almost always in 36 MHz and 72 MHz wide chunks. You could buy one from Thales, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., but to the operator's customers, they all basically looked the same.
But if the board decided to stick to Geostationary orbit, they were doing the smart thing by treating it like a real estate business. Because it is literally real estate.
In the terrestrial real-estate analogy, this seems to me like missing out on potential returns because you built the wrong type of building on the land you own.
Anyway, Starlink wants to scale up to 42,000 satellites. I can't imagine that's anywhere close to the maximum number that could fit in their altitude range. After all, if arranged in a grid, that's just ~ 200 x 200 satellites. The earth's surface area is many orders of magnitude larger than that, and the satellites are occupying a larger (and much thicker) orbital shell.
The product they sell is a highly complex product that took half a decade of development and substantial upfront investment in technology and organization.
The difference here is that SES has to get up front investment to buy productive asset that could then make money. The never had to do a huge up front investment in technology, including a whole butt-load of very complex very unique hardware and software.
And that's not enough, because the terminals are just as big a part of having a functional LEO platform as the sats are. And that again requires a very complex development and a very large upfront investment in production.
Literally non of this stuff, neither the rocket, nor the sats, nor the operations, nor the terminals are a commodity in any sense.
You can go to a space company and ask to buy some propulsion for such a sat, no problem. But if you tell them 'we would like to buy 5000' your gone get back blank stares. Nobody just has something like that just laying around. And then you go down the line of every single part on the sat, no provider actually has the capabilities you need, and your gone have to get involved with financing all of that at least partially.
Say what you will about Elon et. al, it's probably true. But Starlink is a killer tool for people that live where Comcast and AT&T refuse to build lines. It's a much better deal (infinite bandwidth versus metered) and a no-brainer for anyone that's still paying for expensive, stodgy satnet.
Maybe 60-70 satellites is too small to qualify?
And Iridium is in a very different market segment than OneWeb, Starlink (currently anyway), O3B etc. – they're in the L-band, which allows handheld terminals or very small (i.e. low drag), non-steered/beamformed (i.e. cheap) vehicle antennas, but also severely limits bandwidth.
Starlink might shake up that space a bit with their direct-to-cell plans, but they don't have the global spectrum, nor the international landing rights or safety-of-life certifications required to be a viable competitor to somebody like Iridium or even Inmarsat in that space.
I read this article the opposite way, it seems this is just a big merger in the industry which will mean less competition.
Also mentioned in the article:
>Viasat [...] last year purchased Inmarsat
I didn't know this happened, but that's another example of a big merger reducing competition.
This article seems like some positive spin on an event that would otherwise be construed as bad for customers and the industry as a whole.
He has written a book about SpaceX and has good relationship with SpaceX and Musk.
He is the Senior Editor for Space.
SES operates, among many other satellites, the O3B fleet, a MEO constellation providing high-throughput, low (compared to GEO) latency data connections for marine, aviation, and defense users.
Intelsat has a partnership with OneWeb (itself owned by Eutelsat), a direct Starlink competitor in LEO. Intelsat also runs most of what used to be Gogo inflight (the satellite part of it anyway) for several US and international airlines.
Just looking at the commercial aviation market (i.e. in-flight Wi-Fi), between their deployed GEO, MEO, and LEO solutions, they serve a significant fraction of the market today.
Doesn't look like they could counter starlink in anyway anytime soon
next gen o3b m-power satellites are already broken and delayed: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ses-o3b-mpower-sa...
99% of SES Profits come from their legacy Video (satellite tv) business
"Project Kuiper is an initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Its mission is to bring fast, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world."
https://www.aboutamazon.com/what-we-do/devices-services/proj...
On the other hand, Internet connectivity (net neutrality violations nonwithstanding) is extremely fungible, and satellites have the advantage of not requiring complex terrestrial infrastructure, unlike e.g. cable or cell operators.
The only thing tying you to a given constellation or satellite ISP is possibly your antenna and/or terminal, and looking at the aviation space, we're already seeing some interoperable solutions giving airlines interoperability between vendors.
Netflix not only had technology no one else had (at that time), but an innovative business model that hinted that it might provide something to its customers that no one else had ever offered to anyone outside of science fiction: the world's entire video library, on demand.
Instead though, we get the equivalent of a thousand channels of cable tv, all paid for individually, all overpriced, all artificially restricted. You get that right, Netflix takes shows off its catalog because the contracts ran out, but when CBS+ or whatever it's called now takes shows off its roster, they're just doing it to be assholes.
Compare this to Starlink's promise. Tens of thousands of low orbit satellites, providing cheap, low latency, high speed data anywhere on Earth. Tom Hanks wakes up on the uninhabited sandbar in the middle of the Pacific, takes his cellphone out of the ziplock plastic bag, calls his girlfriend and tells her "get me the fuck out of here". The End.
They might yet hold onto it, you can hardly do even a half-assed Starliink without SpaceX's launch capability. But what we might have in 10 years scares me. Incomplete constellations because they're squabbling over orbital slots, monopolies and carve-outs through politics, Verizon refusing to let the iPhones it sells to customers access Starlink, instead locking it to Bezos' own Blue Dildo satellite network.
It's just not the sort of competition people envision, I think, when they're imagining how competition lowers prices and raises quality. It's just big corporations sabotaging their rivals (and the rivals' customers) through meddling and politics.
What tech was that? Netflix was not the first to stream professionally-produced video content (or even that content in high-quality / HD video) over the internet. Are you referring to recommendation algorithms?
And, as far as the library goes, Netflix streaming video never had, and never intended on having, all content. In fact, their library was quite small, precisely because of their subscription business model. The cost structure and licensing regimes would never support it.
Agree that Starlink is something else. Hopefully the meddling doesn't mess it up.
But on topic, I remain cautiously optimistic even though I don't seriously think they will pull it off. I mean they technically likely can but are very likely to ask nasty prices.
The overwhelming alternative is people who never make anything advance and talk like this:
> In a fast-moving and competitive satellite communication industry, this transaction expands our multi-orbit space network, spectrum portfolio, ground infrastructure around the world, go-to-market capabilities, managed service solutions, and financial profile
Anyway, what really gets me is people denying that Elon has some real chops when it comes to engineering and business management.
A lot of people even take it one step further and pretend like Tesla isn't a capable EV producer, because Elon once wrote something on twitter that upset them.
The problem there isn't that they're upset with Elon, that's totally fine, he frequently earns that. But being unable to recognize that he had also done some good work that is completely unrelated to those silly remarks on twitter, that is the problem.
This phenomenon should not be confused with criticizing actual flaws in any work Elon has done, which is of course great, but that's very often not what's happening in "discussions" about his companies.
Or just some other person, successful or not.
It's far from a dichotomy. There are plenty of successful companies and CEOs out there.
OK, that's a very cynical take. But Starlink is revolutionizing the business, and historically, merging is what the dinosaur companies often do after the revolution hits. Think of the mergers between Unix workstation vendors as the PC was revolutionizing computing.
Merging lets you get bigger. But in a revolutionary environment, faster wins, bigger doesn't. Merging is therefore a useless response. (In fact, it's worse than useless, because it slows you down.)
What alternative would you propose to merging? If the market re-stabilizes in a different position merging could be successful. If a revolution happens, it will probably not, but still better than doing nothing.
I don't know.
> but still better than doing nothing.
Maybe not. Maybe it takes away management attention from figuring out how to actually be competitive in the new environment.
"We have to do something; this is something; therefore we have to do this" is rarely the right thing to do. It's often just a mask for "we don't know what to do".
On the other hand, "we can't figure out what to do, but we're dead if we don't do something, so we're going to do something and hope that it randomly turns out to be useful" may have a higher expectation value than doing nothing.
Copying. Copying the revolutionary competitor(s). Just don't have qualms. Start small to see that you can do it, then raise all the capital you need to go big.
I'm dead serious. When an innovator/disruptor comes along, if you the reigning champ does not out-innovate them quick, then the reigning champ will have to hand their crown to the newcomer. It's really hard for established players to out-innovate up-and-coming competitors because often the established player wants to milk their current customers, but to out-innovate the newbies requires lowering prices, which requires lowering costs, which requires lowering revenue (and earnings) in the short term in order to enable a brighter future. Reducing revenue and earnings on purpose is culturally really hard for established companies to do.
There are companies that have done this well at times. I'm thinking of Microsoft. It can be done.
SpaceX was a high risk venture that paid off, props.
Most CEOs do not spend $44 billion USD to broadcast their most abhorrent thoughts to the world. Everyone is flawed, but nobody likes a loud boor.
> its his money.
Tesla is 12th largest public company by market cap, between Broadcom and Novo Nordisk. Those companies have CEOs, but those CEOs do not habitually make controversial statements on Internet fora. It is possible for a person to be flawed, but not to spend effort ensuring wide distribution of those flaws.
Zero CEOs do that.
Look at sports, where even at the "mere" multi-million dollar level, people get changed. The music industry and Hollywood are also famous for people being revealed to be mere human.
Sounds promising..
> The acquisition will create a combined company boasting a fleet of some 100 multi-ton satellites in geostationary orbit, a ring of spacecraft located more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. This will be more than twice the size of the fleet of the next-largest commercial geostationary satellite operator.
Huh?
> SES, based in Luxembourg
Right, the European technological thought
From Investopedia:
> A mature industry may be at its peak or just past it but not yet in the decline phase. While earnings may be stable, growth prospects are few and far between as the remaining companies consolidate market share and create barriers for new competitors to enter the sphere
All good but it has nothing to do with Starlink.
This is hilarious to me - because the incumbent players in the satellite networking business were slow, anti-competitive dinosaurs.
They were the ones who needed to be "countered" with something that was/is; - cost-effective - low-latency - high-bandwidth
They had decades of essentially monopolistic ownership of this "space" and failed to innovate.
For as much as I dislike a certain billionaire - SpaceX is doing what all the other incumbent players did not - and honestly that sounds far more promising than dinosaurs merging with each other.
Intelsat and SES are mostly GEO players, and that market is extremely competitive. It's just not great for many interactive use cases due to its latency. (SES does own O3B, which is MEO, but it seems to be somewhat of a niche player.)
LEO constellations used to be prohibitively expensive until SpaceX brought the cost per launch down massively.
Is there a better alternative to "the one to beat" spending unsustainably, only to fail once all competitors are too far behind to stay viable?
You mean it’s obliterating traditional western competitors but facing stiff competition from China?
While the Model Y is doing great (global top seller, #5 in U.S. for 2023) it's just one model. If you look at the U.S. total auto sales in 2023, Tesla accounted for 7% of the Top 25 best selling models, while the five brands that did better accounted for a combined 67% (and those brands include Ford, Chevrolet and Ram.)
Tesla's bet is that just a few models with minimal changes over time (outside of software) will be enough to "obliterate" the existing car sales model of making a wide enough variety of vehicle models for everyone's tastes, and keeping those models fresh and new to keep sales going. Time will tell, but it would be surprising for the Western companies to be obliterated, when their top sellers are still pickup trucks (750K F-series sold in 2023), and there's no competition from Tesla (unless you count the 4000 Cybertrucks.)
Here’s an HN discussion about firing the leads of Starlink[1] early in development (2018). And another in the following year laying off 10% of the workforce[2] (2019).