[Starlink] SpaceX ordered to explain pricing strategy

[David Lang]

Larry dug up this paper, is it the one that is being referred to?

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9568932__;!!P7nkOOY!qET50RjNacuVwWboH6o-ccJn3yQcttBzx_KR4d_dd2ANtk8ddNdOkK7xNwJFuMrkde30zl-ZZCr7KQ$


lots of 'interesting' assumptions in this paper (right off the bat, that 
everyone is spending the same amount per satellite, which I think makes the 
non-starlink systems look much better than they are)

I also suspect that they are over-estimating starlink costs in a fairly 
substantial way. They say that falcon 9 launches are going to be cheaper because 
it's so reliable, so insurance rates are going to be lower. I'd assume that 
SpaceX is not paying for insurance on the satellites (I'm sure they have 
insurance against damage on the ground)

but even with all this, they list a NPV cost of $0.6M per starlink satellite 
over a 5 year period supporting 2500 subscribers @0.1/km^2 or $200/subscriber 
for the satellite assets with each subscriber paying $6000 over that timeframe 
(there are ground station costs, etc, but with 5k satellites, the satellite 
costs dominate)

Musk has said that without Starship and the v2 starlink satellites, the finances 
barely work, but Starship will significantly decrease the per-satellite costs, 
and the v2 satellites will increase the bandwith available per sq km, and the 
increase in the number of satellites from ~5k to ~40k will increase the number 
of satellites and therefor the bandwith per sq km again.

it doesn't seem such an open-and-shut case that starlink will have to increase 
prices dreastically to survive. They may, but it's not that obvious that they 
must.

Also, that 25Mb/s bandwidth figure is what happens in the peak hour that 
everyone is using the system. If that does not suffer from bad bloat, that's 
actually a fairly comfortable rate, enough for several people to be streaming HD 
video (although for 4k video it gets tighter, but still works) When my 
cablemodem drops out and I fall back to 8/1 DSL, my zoom calls notice when I 
have other people streaming video (along with email/etc), but I'm still usually 
not the worst on the call. 3x that bandwidth (unbloated) would be quite 
comfortable for several people.

David Lang
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