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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Huston estimates 2.3M Starlink users worldwide while SpaceX reports 8M customers. That's a massive difference.

Possibly a lot of those missing ones are military ones that don't want to be counted for security reasons? Just thinking

Or, perhaps SpaceX fudged the nunbers so they look as if they have more users.

Don't want to be a hater in this, I love what SpaceX is doing, but Musk has been known to play PR games, so he's an unreliable narrator at best.

Wouldnt be suprised if they said, we have about 2M users, lets estimate a common household per user, to inflate the numbers.

Here's a public enumeration of CPE's on the network from last year

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18243.

Starlink is a very flexible and consumer friendly ISP. I’ve stopped service and started service many times from the app. Right now I’m on a rare-use plan.

So two months ago I was a user but wouldn’t have shown up on the internet. Right now I’m paying but you probably won’t see me.

I'm a Starlink user technically, but haven't had my service enabled for over 3 years. People like me might help account for this discrepancy.

They are not evenly distributed though, so the density differences isn't that big for the purposes of regional geolocation.

Not really. A lot of Starlink installations, like mine, are strictly for emergency backup purposes. My account stays suspended 99% of the time, but it's reasonable for them to count me as a "customer."

His estimate is 3.1 million

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