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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.

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For any dense populated area, starlink cost explodes exponentially to support customers there, while fiber/5G is linear.

You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.

Fair point. But they still have more potential customers than any other individual ISP. Lack of potential customers is not their limiting factor.

Yes, but the primary reason for Starlink is for areas with poor traditional ISPs.

If you had a choice between Fiber or Starlink, you’d choose Fiber.

So as traditional ISPs improve service and coverage, Starlink becomes less in demand.

Sounds like a great long-term investment.

Starlink would only make sense if the world was not getting more and more concentrated around densely populated areas.

I think it'd be easier for Starlink to start building and deploying wide area ground stations (like 5g towers or something) to serve urban areas than it would take all the other telcos to deploy satellites.

Why in the world would any MNO or WISP choose satellite backhaul for urban areas when their next tower is presumably only a few kilometres over (as opposed to tens of kilometres in more regional areas)?

I don't know, that's an interesting, albeit unrelated question. Do you have an answer?

How is the question of "how satellite backhaul is useful in urban areas" unrelated to your implicit thesis that satellite backhaul is useful in urban areas?

Why are the satellites required at all?

Telcos manage many multiples of Starlink's traffic just fine over terrestrial high-bandwidth optic fiber.

They really don't manage the traffic well over terrestrial lines for the globe, that's why starlink, iridium, viasat, even directv have all used satellites. Billions of taxpayer money and even more private funding have been devoted to bringing lines to rural areas and the area covered is still so small.

Areas where Starlink makes sense are usually the same areas where people experience economic troubles: rural areas.

Starlink has excellent military applications. The consumer business is a dishonest joke to fool investors.

The killer app is military usage, so they just need enough consumer and b2b demand to keep what they charge governments within what they can justify to taxpayers

Which militaries are you thinking and how much do you anticipate them spending and/or being willing to try and justify?

First, they would need global coverage for that. Because looking at this map tells a different story: https://starlink.com/gb/map

It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.

They have global coverage. You don't need a map to know that.

At some point in next decade they can literally be the biggest ISP by far, insane potential always. It's all about how long it takes to get there

if you're in a city (where most people live) it'll never be cheaper to get this than fiber

Tell that to the Ukrainians and Syrians.

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