I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency.
Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still seems expensive for the third world that the author is talking about.
These aren't geostationary satellites. There's no opportunity cost to selling service when flying over poorer countries. Of course, the price has to include the backhaul, and even poor countries have rich residents, but in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.
He however owns a significant percentage of both companies.
Countries already do this to pressure countries and/or individual entities. Trade embargoes are against entire countries, trade sanctions are over certain industries/companies/specific individuals.
I clear international freight through customs for a living, when I have a shipment containing something coming from/made in a sanctioned country I have to search the OFAC sanctions list for every party mentioned on the shipment https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
China, or Fictionaltopia, could easily put pressure on one company to influence another if they have a significant investor in common.
> in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.
It wouldn't if the satellite network is operating at capacity, and therefore you can't guarantee service.
Satellites communicate with one another to send information around the world. Most servers are not in developing nations— a lot of them are in the US, for example. Satellites from all over the world will all try to reach the ones that are near the US, so those will dictate the actual capacity of the entire network.
If the network operates at capacity, prices will rise so low-profit customers leave and make space for high-paying ones.
So you assume Starlink will relay the data primarily between satellites and will avoid handing them over to ground till close to destination? Why?
Consider the inter-satellite relay is still in development and current mode of operation was described as "bent pipe". Even when it will be developed, it makes sense to offload data to nearest convenient fiber-connected ground station instead of satellites around the globe.
Their costs are mostly fixed and bandwidth is limited by the number of satellites overhead so will be as high in Mali as New York. If they want to maximize their profits they'll price their bandwidth so that they're able to supply most of the resulting demand in both places.
Why wouldn't it trickle down? I feel like all new technologies start out with rich people/early adopters subsidizing mass adoption costs (refrigerators, TVs, computers, cell phones, electric cars)
The problem is that rich people live in areas that have good mobile coverage, and Starlink won't be very attractive to them. LTE can offer transfers better than 600 Mbps with lower latency today, and covers 99% of population (in the developed countries). 5G will get over 1 Gbps per sector and it's coming soon.
Rich people have boats, by definition these are people with too much money to spend and is a huge market. Airplanes? This will revolutionize coverage on long haul non-polar flights.
Trains? Buses? These both have density issues with the existing cellular network. How many times have you come to a halt in a traffic jam only to have horrible cellular coverage due to the local cell site being overwhelmed?
5G doesn't solve any of these use-cases. There is plenty of room for adoption of starlink at premium prices.
With enough people in once place, Starlink will suffer from congestion just like a cellular network. I don't think it's fundamentally different in that regard. But great for boats indeed!
> Maybe you could roam on another LEO provider. There are over a dozen companies from a number of countries planning their own Starlinks.
I mean, they're planning their own internet satellite constellations. None of them are anywhere close to the 12k satellites in the original Starlink proposal. If you added everyone else's proposals together, you might make 1 more Starlink, but probably not.
5G may hit 1 Gb/s peak, but I'm 100% sure that the major US carriers will throttle the crap out of it so that you don't get anywhere near that. I'm on Verizon in a decent sized city, and any streaming is throttled heavily. Speedtests work fine because the carriers know how to game them. But actual throughput on cellular sucks.
They throttle, because there is much more demand than available bandwidth. However in cellular networks, you can add more bandwidth relatively cheaply by adding more nodes in high demand areas, and the total bandwidth of a single node is already higher than the promised 600 Mbps of Starlink. Therefore Starlink is not a competitor to cellular networks, because it can't compete by throughout nor latency. It competes with coverage though, but I'm not sure of there are enough rich people in boats to cover the investment.
Industrial sensing equipment, airliners, high-frequency traders could all be some of the 'rich' first customers. They are all underserved by the LTE networks and have the money to pay for a reliable, low-latency connection.
Latency will be higher than LTE just because of the distance.
And I'm not sure if a long distance satellite link would be more reliable than a local LTE link with a dedicated antenna.
It's all going to depend on prices and we don't know how they will be set.
Having a backup way of communicating can be important, even if you don't use it much. Land lines are expensive. If there is a low enough monthly fee, maybe a backup connection via Starlink will be feasible?
Unless you mean a village with just two houses, typical villages are covered by cellular networks just fine. Starlink looks like a system for people in deserts or people in third world where LTE doesn't exist. Not sure if this is big enough market.
There are huge swathes of rural Australia with non existent or very spotty mobile reception same with broadband band other than sat that is geo stationery which are frankly garbage.
The US DoD has paid SpaceX to proof of concept having hundreds of Mb/s of low latency connectivity in fighter aircraft. Lucrative market based on historical DoD satellite communications contracts.
Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still seems expensive for the third world that the author is talking about.