* [Starlink] a bit more starship news
@ 2023-04-30 12:48 Dave Taht
2023-04-30 21:48 ` David Lang
2023-05-03 2:42 ` Luis A. Cornejo
0 siblings, 2 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Dave Taht @ 2023-04-30 12:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Dave Taht via Starlink
Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M
Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
(and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]
This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
offshore*, in the comments.
Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
projecting 4-5 flights this year.
https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
size.
Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)
[1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
--
AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-04-30 12:48 [Starlink] a bit more starship news Dave Taht
@ 2023-04-30 21:48 ` David Lang
2023-05-03 2:42 ` Luis A. Cornejo
1 sibling, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: David Lang @ 2023-04-30 21:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Dave Taht; +Cc: Dave Taht via Starlink
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3861 bytes --]
the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2 satellites,
they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon 9.
I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later this
year.
Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink having
positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
David Lang
On Sun, 30 Apr 2023, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:
> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 05:48:20 -0700
> From: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Reply-To: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
> To: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
>
> Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
> debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
> Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M
>
> Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
> concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
> site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
> diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
> (and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
> trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
> build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
> the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]
>
> This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
> stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
> seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
> offshore*, in the comments.
>
> Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
> to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
> and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
> projecting 4-5 flights this year.
>
> https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
> thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
> starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
> effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
> into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
> continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
> the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
> Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
> getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
> have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
> size.
>
> Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
> which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
> bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
> then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
> shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
> growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
> users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
> to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
> soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
> trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
> years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
> https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> --
> AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-04-30 12:48 [Starlink] a bit more starship news Dave Taht
2023-04-30 21:48 ` David Lang
@ 2023-05-03 2:42 ` Luis A. Cornejo
2023-05-03 2:45 ` Dave Taht
1 sibling, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Luis A. Cornejo @ 2023-05-03 2:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Dave Taht; +Cc: Dave Taht via Starlink
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5382 bytes --]
I think they are overpriced for what they deliver, at least in my part of
the world (north of Houston.) I dropped them last month once the extra $10
made it go to $120, they charge $90 in other places in the US. I guess the
MBAs are doing "market segmentation," in other words, just charging what
the market can bear, well given the state of the economy and the costs of
goods, they pushed me out of that market.
I switched to Verizon LTE and it's been really great 50/5 ish for $50. A
pretty good price for the service, Starlink is not 140% better, in fact
it's worse on average, and did not get better for the year that I had it...
well actually it got progressively worse on average.
Now if they ever offer a reasonable plan for a reasonable price, I'll be
all over it, I like redundancy. A 50/5 for about $50/mo would probably
bring me back, or even a smaller bandwidth for less money would probably
bite and I really want them to succeed.
In the case of the WISPs, I can definitely believe the churn. WISPs that
run libreqos are more than likely very well run networks, I bet those who
leave quickly realize how good they have had it. Of course StarLink can
probably mirror (for all practical purposes) a well run WISP, if they would
only listen/hire you for a little while and fix their bufferbloat!
Speaking of WISPs, I thought I was going to get NextLink service at my
place, but it turns out the system isn't quite here yet. I got excited
since I've read that they were deploying Tarana gear, and was looking
forward to testing that out, I've only seen very little with regards to the
Tarana gear in a real world environment. I live among the tall pines of
east Texas and getting line of sight requires obnoxiously large towers.
Anybody else has any information about the Tarana systems in the real world
and not just a PtP quick test? This was pretty interesting though as
someone who appreciates redundant/fault tolerant systems:
https://www.taranawireless.com/ngfwa-technology-that-keeps-customers-connected/
-Luis
On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 7:48 AM Dave Taht via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
> debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
> Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M
>
> Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
> concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
> site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
> diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
> (and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
> trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
> build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
> the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]
>
> This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
> stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
> seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
> offshore*, in the comments.
>
> Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
> to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
> and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
> projecting 4-5 flights this year.
>
> https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
> thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
> starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
> effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
> into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
> continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
> the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
> Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
> getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
> have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
> size.
>
> Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
> which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
> bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
> then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
> shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
> growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
> users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
> to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
> soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
> trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
> years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
> https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> --
> AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-05-03 2:42 ` Luis A. Cornejo
@ 2023-05-03 2:45 ` Dave Taht
0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Dave Taht @ 2023-05-03 2:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Luis A. Cornejo; +Cc: Dave Taht via Starlink
On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 7:42 PM Luis A. Cornejo <luis.a.cornejo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think they are overpriced for what they deliver, at least in my part of the world (north of Houston.) I dropped them last month once the extra $10 made it go to $120, they charge $90 in other places in the US. I guess the MBAs are doing "market segmentation," in other words, just charging what the market can bear, well given the state of the economy and the costs of goods, they pushed me out of that market.
>
> I switched to Verizon LTE and it's been really great 50/5 ish for $50. A pretty good price for the service, Starlink is not 140% better, in fact it's worse on average, and did not get better for the year that I had it... well actually it got progressively worse on average.
Have you tried "cake-autorate" for your LTE yet?
>
> Now if they ever offer a reasonable plan for a reasonable price, I'll be all over it, I like redundancy. A 50/5 for about $50/mo would probably bring me back, or even a smaller bandwidth for less money would probably bite and I really want them to succeed.
>
> In the case of the WISPs, I can definitely believe the churn. WISPs that run libreqos are more than likely very well run networks, I bet those who leave quickly realize how good they have had it. Of course StarLink can probably mirror (for all practical purposes) a well run WISP, if they would only listen/hire you for a little while and fix their bufferbloat!
>
> Speaking of WISPs, I thought I was going to get NextLink service at my place, but it turns out the system isn't quite here yet. I got excited since I've read that they were deploying Tarana gear, and was looking forward to testing that out, I've only seen very little with regards to the Tarana gear in a real world environment. I live among the tall pines of east Texas and getting line of sight requires obnoxiously large towers. Anybody else has any information about the Tarana systems in the real world and not just a PtP quick test? This was pretty interesting though as someone who appreciates redundant/fault tolerant systems:
>
> https://www.taranawireless.com/ngfwa-technology-that-keeps-customers-connected/
I am very interested in NLOS wireless services such as what tarana
promises. I am trying to get data from this
facebook group over here, about it:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/taranawireless/posts/1395880697842422/
>
> -Luis
>
> On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 7:48 AM Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
>> debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
>> Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M
>>
>> Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
>> concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
>> site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
>> diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
>> (and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
>> trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
>> build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
>> the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]
>>
>> This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
>> stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
>> seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
>> offshore*, in the comments.
>>
>> Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
>> to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
>> and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
>> projecting 4-5 flights this year.
>>
>> https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>>
>> I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
>> thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
>> starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
>> effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
>> into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
>> continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
>> the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
>> Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
>> getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
>> have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
>> size.
>>
>> Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
>> which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
>> bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
>> then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
>> shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
>> growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
>> users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
>> to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
>> soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
>> trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
>> years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
>> https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)
>>
>> [1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>>
>> --
>> AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
>> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
>> _______________________________________________
>> Starlink mailing list
>> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
--
Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058793910227111937/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-05-01 22:32 ` Ulrich Speidel
@ 2023-05-01 22:45 ` David Lang
0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: David Lang @ 2023-05-01 22:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Ulrich Speidel; +Cc: starlink
On Tue, 2 May 2023, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink wrote:
> I'd add that with what is probably a couple of million subscribers
> worldwide by now at US$100/month and growing fast, it gives you a fair
> idea as to how much you can accomplish with $200 million or so a month
> at your disposal. I remember O3b putting its initial constellation into
> orbit at around $1.2 billion - half a year's worth of Starlink income at
> most - but a multi-year endeavour. You can blow up a lot of launch pads
> and rockets for that, especially if you build them cheap.
not to mention that Falcon 9s are much cheaper than what was available at that
point (they've successfully underbid companies listing $25M for a launch, so
that seems like a reasonalbe figure to use for their internal costs)
David Lang
> On 2/05/2023 9:09 am, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
>> On Mon, 1 May 2023, David P. Reed via Starlink wrote:
>>
>>>> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)
>>>
>>>> From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
>>> ...
>>>> the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2
>>>> satellites,
>>>> they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a
>>>> Falcon 9.
>>>>
>>>> I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship
>>>> later this
>>>> year.
>>>>
>>>> Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of
>>>> Starlink having
>>>> positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
>>>
>>>
>>> "Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly?
>>> I.'ve never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash
>>> flow as any kind of business metric.
>>
>> that it earns more money than it spent in that 3 month period, and
>> expected to do the same in 2023.
>>
>> SpaceX is private (so it doesn't have to impress the Wall Street
>> clueless folks), it deosn't get 'cost plus' contracts. There is far
>> less incentive to do creative accounting than if either of these were
>> true.
>>
>> David Lang
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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
>>
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-05-01 21:09 ` David Lang
@ 2023-05-01 22:32 ` Ulrich Speidel
2023-05-01 22:45 ` David Lang
0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Ulrich Speidel @ 2023-05-01 22:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: starlink
I'd add that with what is probably a couple of million subscribers
worldwide by now at US$100/month and growing fast, it gives you a fair
idea as to how much you can accomplish with $200 million or so a month
at your disposal. I remember O3b putting its initial constellation into
orbit at around $1.2 billion - half a year's worth of Starlink income at
most - but a multi-year endeavour. You can blow up a lot of launch pads
and rockets for that, especially if you build them cheap.
On 2/05/2023 9:09 am, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
> On Mon, 1 May 2023, David P. Reed via Starlink wrote:
>
>>> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)
>>
>>> From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
>> ...
>>> the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2
>>> satellites,
>>> they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a
>>> Falcon 9.
>>>
>>> I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship
>>> later this
>>> year.
>>>
>>> Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of
>>> Starlink having
>>> positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
>>
>>
>> "Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly?
>> I.'ve never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash
>> flow as any kind of business metric.
>
> that it earns more money than it spent in that 3 month period, and
> expected to do the same in 2023.
>
> SpaceX is private (so it doesn't have to impress the Wall Street
> clueless folks), it deosn't get 'cost plus' contracts. There is far
> less incentive to do creative accounting than if either of these were
> true.
>
> David Lang
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
--
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
****************************************************************
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-05-01 21:01 ` David P. Reed
2023-05-01 21:05 ` Freddie Cash
@ 2023-05-01 21:09 ` David Lang
2023-05-01 22:32 ` Ulrich Speidel
1 sibling, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: David Lang @ 2023-05-01 21:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: David P. Reed; +Cc: starlink
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1060 bytes --]
On Mon, 1 May 2023, David P. Reed via Starlink wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)
>
>> From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
> ...
>> the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2 satellites,
>> they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon 9.
>>
>> I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later this
>> year.
>>
>> Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink having
>> positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
>
>
> "Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly? I.'ve never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash flow as any kind of business metric.
that it earns more money than it spent in that 3 month period, and expected to
do the same in 2023.
SpaceX is private (so it doesn't have to impress the Wall Street clueless
folks), it deosn't get 'cost plus' contracts. There is far less incentive to do
creative accounting than if either of these were true.
David Lang
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 149 bytes --]
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
2023-05-01 21:01 ` David P. Reed
@ 2023-05-01 21:05 ` Freddie Cash
2023-05-01 21:09 ` David Lang
1 sibling, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Freddie Cash @ 2023-05-01 21:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: David P. Reed; +Cc: starlink
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1082 bytes --]
On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 2:01 PM David P. Reed via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
> ...
>
> > the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2
> satellites,
> > they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon
> 9.
> >
> > I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later
> this
> > year.
> >
> > Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink
> having
> > positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
>
> "Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly? I.'ve
> never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash flow as any
> kind of business metric.
>
Meaning, for one fiscal quarter (ie a 3-month period) they made more money
than they spent. "...they had a quarter of..." means the 3-month period of
the calendar (a quarter), not 25% of the business. :)
--
Freddie Cash
fjwcash@gmail.com
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: [Starlink] a bit more starship news
[not found] <mailman.9.1682956802.8936.starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
@ 2023-05-01 21:01 ` David P. Reed
2023-05-01 21:05 ` Freddie Cash
2023-05-01 21:09 ` David Lang
0 siblings, 2 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: David P. Reed @ 2023-05-01 21:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: starlink
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> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:48:51 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
...
> the V2 mini satllites do not have the same capability as the full V2 satellites,
> they are cut down in capacity as well as in size to fit them on a Falcon 9.
>
> I would not be surprised to see v2 satellites launched on Starship later this
> year.
>
> Gwen Shotwell said late last year that they had a quarter of Starlink having
> positive cash flow, and that it's expected to be profitable in 2023
"Quarter of Starlink having positive cash flow" means what exactly? I.'ve never heard a quarter of a corporation having positive cash flow as any kind of business metric.
Of course, since Starlink and SpaceX are subject to completely weird accounting standards (including providing software assistance to Twitter for free, and other shenanigans in the accounting world according to Musk), it could mean anything.
I worked with Iridium and Motorola during the phase before it was sold for scrap to the DoD, essentially. What's fascinating is how "creative accounting" between then and the current Starlink continues to persist. Motorola's Chris Galvin was a lot like Musk w.r.t. not seeing clearly what was happening - he was isolated by sycophants who really wanted to believe that there was a business there. Then later Motorola completely screwed up its cellular tech business by betting against GPRS and the Europeans. Should have hedged and participated in the rapid cellular industry growth, but instead, basically drove a great tech company into the ground.
As a I watch Starlink and SpaceX play a shell game with their business economics, it's fascinating to watch a similar thing play out.
Especially watching the "fan boys and girls" get taken for a ride as the Iridium "fan boys and girls" did - including stunts like showing that you could make a phone call from Mt. Everest, as if that was gonna fix the underlying lack of business strategy for success.
The current version of this "fan thinking" is the idea that somehow the satellites can route packets among themselves and provide a low-latency, high-quality Internet access service. As Dave Taht points out, we don't see the customer churn rates as people discover the bufferbloat effects as the customers scale, and which are largely designed into the Starlink systems architecture (the satellites' packet routing architecture).
But yeah, we might send a few people to Mars to die there.
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2023-04-30 12:48 [Starlink] a bit more starship news Dave Taht
2023-04-30 21:48 ` David Lang
2023-05-03 2:42 ` Luis A. Cornejo
2023-05-03 2:45 ` Dave Taht
[not found] <mailman.9.1682956802.8936.starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
2023-05-01 21:01 ` David P. Reed
2023-05-01 21:05 ` Freddie Cash
2023-05-01 21:09 ` David Lang
2023-05-01 22:32 ` Ulrich Speidel
2023-05-01 22:45 ` David Lang
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