I wasn’t suggesting 500k users was anywhere near break even point, but the opposite - that they need orders of magnitude to reach profitability.
Lifespan of a satellite is determined by many factors, including decay of solar panels and batteries, or radiation and thermal damage. You can design satellites to last decades, as the GSO operators do, but they become really expensive as a result. The equation becomes “how much time does a satellite spend serving paying customers before it dies”.
The financial modeling is extremely complex. As an example, do you consider a satellite serving a customer for a few minutes a day, at $100/month, as fully participant in that revenue? Or do you assign the proportional amount of revenue to the time serving (e.g. $2.50). Do you book the time satellites are over non-serviced area as a loss? Or just lost revenue opportunity? Does a gateway site become a standalone entity? Or do you have 9 antennas, and thus 9 entities, each with an independent contribution to revenue?
Using all the above as examples, not to start a discussion which would be very off-topic :-)
On Jun 30, 2021, 9:30 AM +0200, David Lang <david@lang.hm>, wrote:
they have FCC approval for 1m customer terminals in the US, and have asked to
increase that due to demonstrated demand (to something like 5m terminals)
500k customers is not nearly the break-even point, but that's still a lot of
equipment deployed and supported.
I suspect that they will be more limited by the number of stations they can
build than the interest from customers. As user density increases, they will
need to launch more satellites, but as Starship comes online, the cost to do so
will drop significantly.
the orbital life of a satellite may end up being a bit better than you think,
they will de-orbit by themselves after about 5 years, but they do have thrusters
that they can use to raise their orbits to extend their lives if they don't need
the fuel for collision avoidance.
David Lang
On Wed, 30 Jun 2021, Mike Puchol wrote:
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2021 09:23:02 +0200
From: Mike Puchol <mike@starlink.sx>
To: David Lang <david@lang.hm>, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
Cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Starlink] 69,000 Users
500k customers is ~$600m in gross revenue per year. Assuming no operating costs, takes, etc., $10bn takes ~16 years to pay back. They need to add way more customers onto that investment.
In traditional land-based telcos, it is frequent to split the backbone and customer sides, having a “TowerCo” with all the expensive infrastructure, that has a payback period of 25 years, and “CustomerCo” where payback needs to be 12-18 months. In Starlink’s case, unless they cannot increase satellite lifespan, and/or make them very cheap, the payback period is fixed at 5 years. For gateways and ground infrastructure, you can stretch it to compensate, but you cannot justify, say, a 50 year payback.
IMHO the direct to customer side will end up being residual, high price for those who really need it, and their revenue will come from backhauling mobile and FTTH operators, airlines, cruises, and the military.
Best,
Mike
On Jun 30, 2021, 7:48 AM +0200, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>, wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 10:24 PM David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:
I think that was 69k simultanious users
dishy production cost is currently down to ~$1k/unit (I've heard that it was
~$3k/unit for the first ones)
Keep hoping they will add good, nay, great!! queue management.
Software costs nothing in qty.
But the long term upside if they can pull it off is a license to print money,
I've seen speculation that it's on the order of 30B/year when fully built
I think that's kind of doable.
It's too bad all those users are behind a CGN and cannot talk to each
other, routing calls at least from one village to another would stay
on the same sat.
David Lang
On Tue, 29 Jun 2021, Daniel AJ Sokolov wrote:
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 19:00:32 -0700
From: Daniel AJ Sokolov <daniel@sokolov.eu.org>
To: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: [Starlink] 69,000 Users
Starlink currently has 69,000 User, according to what Elon Musk said
today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
In a year, he wants to have 500,000 users.
He expects having to invest 25 to 30 billion US-Dollars to fully build
Starlink.
Each Dishy costs Starlink about double the current purchase price.
However, they want to reduce the production cost to "a few hundred
dollars" - which is why they are working on their own factory in Texas.
FYI
Daniel
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
--
Latest Podcast:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6791014284936785920/
Dave Täht CTO, TekLibre, LLC
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink