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Comment by breckenedge | Hacker News Reader

These are service providers, not rent seekers. By focusing on OpEx above all else, they missed an opportunity to build starlink first. They were doing the right thing as long as nothing ever changed. Now they’re forced to consolidate further and are probably going to disappear.

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This would only apply if they decided to expand into LEO or MEO.

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.

If space-based telecom moves from GEO to LEO, then there’s no reason for GEO telecoms to exist anymore.

The real estate would still be worth quite a bit, so even in the worst case they will just move on to be literal real estate holding companies.

Satellite TV is probably not going away anytime soon.

Dish and DirecTV are rapidly bleeding customers, the latter is not planning to launch any new birds for this dying business. It might only be a decade before this industry consolidates further into the remaining satellites, with some large providers going extinct entirely.

Yes and no. They also dragged their feet on high-throughput Ka-band spacecraft with smaller spot beams. ViaSat built and launched ViaSat-1 while SES was still ordering satellites designed around analog video broadcast.

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.

That just saying that 'in this massive growth market, we are totally ok with losing the waste majority of market share until we are mostly irrelevant'.

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