[HN Gopher] SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink s...
___________________________________________________________________
SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink satellite
antennas
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-09-13 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| phkahler wrote:
| Does Starlink offer a plan for multi-tenant buildings? I'm
| thinking condo with 30 units. It seems like it should be more
| efficient to run one high bandwidth connection than multiple
| regular customers. Could we share cost among all tenants and get
| a really good deal?
| Stevvo wrote:
| OneWeb might be more suitable for this. At least their biz
| model is based around doing things it, while Starlink is
| direct-to-consumer.
| xoa wrote:
| > _Does Starlink offer a plan for multi-tenant buildings? I 'm
| thinking condo with 30 units. It seems like it should be more
| efficient to run one high bandwidth connection than multiple
| regular customers. Could we share cost among all tenants and
| get a really good deal?_
|
| I'm not quite sure what you're envisioning here? Starlink
| offers a business class service with a more powerful terminal,
| higher QoS, etc. One just gets that and then have it serve as
| the uplink to a LAN which you can subdivide in all the normal
| ways however one wants, that's what I've done with Starlink for
| multiple clients now including one that then feeds to a dozen
| or so different units over a half mile or so. There isn't any
| need to SpaceX to be involved in what happens after their
| terminal, it's no different than a fiber connection WISP or
| ADSL or cable. Everyone can agree to divide up paying for
| service and kit as they wish. Same as if it was going to a
| business that has 2 employees or 20 or 200 or 2000, SpaceX only
| cares (and should only need to care) about the bottom line of
| the monthly bill getting paid and any acceptable use/data TOS
| respected. They don't need any visibility into the network
| beyond their terminal. And Starlink can be part of a failover
| or more complex load balanced WAN too.
| pavon wrote:
| Starlink's ToS prohibit reselling of service, and dividing
| cost of service among several tenants could be considered to
| violate that. Most ISPs would require a specific agreement
| for those sort of things.
|
| [1]
| https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1020-91087-64,
| Sections 2.1 & 10
| xoa wrote:
| > _and dividing cost of service among several tenants could
| be considered to violate that_
|
| Show me the caselaw where multiple people splitting a bill
| would be "reselling", not your head canon make believe if
| you're going to make such an assertion. ISPs grab enough
| power already without us needing to invent new things they
| can do. Reselling as far as I understand means taking a
| good or service and then selling it again for a profit. I'd
| really like to see any examples of people at one address
| being sued for privately deciding to share a bill. Also
| FWIW I don't think it should be legal for ISPs to prohibit
| reselling anyway, but I don't dispute they probably can in
| theory. Splitting a bill though?
|
| > _Most ISPs would require a specific agreement for those
| sort of things._
|
| I think this sounds like absolute bullshit.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| He's right. Usually you need an agreement to resell.
|
| Very few companies monitor these things. But anti resale,
| anti server provisions are common
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| probably not. Any 30 unit building is probably in too urban an
| area for Starlink to be competitive with fiber.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Check out Whittier, Alaska. A port town of 272 people, almost
| all of whom live in a single building.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska#/media/File:W.
| ..
|
| (Another oddity; the only way to drive into that down is
| through a 2.5 mile tunnel with a single lane shared by trains
| and cars. You drive on the train tracks.)
| Symbiote wrote:
| They already have far Internet.
|
| https://uui-alaska.com/whittier-internet-cable-modem-
| cable-t...
| [deleted]
| moyix wrote:
| You'd be surprised. In dense cities like NYC/Brooklyn fiber
| availability varies from block to block, I assume because
| adding new infra is so expensive. We recently moved about
| five blocks away and lost access to fiber :(
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Think ski resorts
| pnpnp wrote:
| That's not necessarily true!
|
| I can think of 3 nearby Rocky Mountain resort towns without
| great cellular or terrestrial internet.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| There's gotta be a point where the cost of running enough
| fiber drops below a sufficient amount of starlink capacity
| though. Hard to say where that number is though.
| HaZeust wrote:
| In fact, I believe Ameristar (or another casino) in
| Blackhawk CO was thinking about using Starlink
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wonder if the antenna is expensive or if it's the other
| electronics in the terminal? I assume it uses a phased array. I
| also assume most phased arrays are pretty cheap.
| teleforce wrote:
| The antenna or the array antenna should be pretty cheap because
| they're technically passive devices. The expensive parts,
| however, are active circuitry namely the down conversion
| circuitry and signal processing for beam steering. The trick is
| to reliably down convert the signal to low frequency baseband
| by maintaining its amplitude and phase in which information is
| encoded since frequency is ephemeral (can be changed and
| manipulated without losing the information). According to
| ChatGPT-4, the user bands for Starlink satellites are mainly
| using Ku-band for downlink between 10.7 to 12.7 GHz (satellite
| to user) and 14 to 14.5 GHz for uplink (user to satellite).
|
| They are 3 ways of doing the frequency conversions namely
| superheterodyne (Single-IF), Direct conversion (Zero-IF) and
| the latest Direct RF sampling. The complexity is decreasing,
| hence the price is decreasing as we go from former to latter.
| Due to the relatively high frequency of Ku-band, Starlink
| antenna systems probably also utilize multiple down conversions
| or multi superheterodyne which make the price to be rather
| expensive due to the increased complexity of the circuitry and
| signal processing.
|
| Now due to the rapid improvement in RF SoC/chip design by
| company like ADI and TI, we now have RF transceiver chip that
| can perform Direct RF sampling utilizing high speed ADC/DAC
| operating in Ku-band. Thus we can expect the price to be going
| down even further. I suspect the decreased in manufacturing for
| the antenna price is not so much due to the their better
| manufacturing iterations, increase yield, etc but mainly due to
| the recent availability of this high speed Direct RF sampling
| transceivers but I can be wrong.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Inside a terminal -
| https://x.com/olegkutkov/status/1526986473114935298
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Phased arrays on the market start at $16k
|
| $25k is probably what you'll spend
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I'm surprised they haven't added an ethernet port back to their
| router.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Well, it's a few more cents on the bill of materials and some
| PCB real estate, and constrains the enclosure form factor.
|
| Ethernet ports have a transformer (or some other kind of
| electrical isolation) inside as well, from memory. Making it an
| add-on means you can spend more on higher quality electrical
| protection so it actually keeps the rest of the terminal safe,
| for those who need wires. And you can replace the add-on when
| mechanical overstress (aka tripping over the ethernet cable) is
| applied.
| genewitch wrote:
| their router can be submitted to the elements, outdoors. good
| luck doing that with an rj-45 on the device. Now, CPE wireless
| stuff (like at&t fixed wireless) has ethernet ports, but you
| have to have bulk cat6 wire, the rj-45 connectors, and a
| crimper to "service" it. I don't know about you, i'm the only
| person i know that has all of those things in my area. the
| dongle to add an ethernet port to the starlink router, on the
| other hand, just requires removing one gasket-laden plug for
| another.
|
| I personally use it as strain relief. It's cheaper to replace
| that dongle than it is to replace the antenna wire, especially
| the 100' one.
| xoa wrote:
| > _their router can be submitted to the elements, outdoors.
| good luck doing that with an rj-45 on the device_
|
| Um, that's very, very easy to do actually. And indeed the
| original v1 Starlink cleanly separated the terminal and the
| router. There was zero need to ever use the included one, you
| could just treat the terminal as a pure WAN link and that's
| it. Works extremely well. The v2 was a significant and
| regrettable downgrade in that respect. There were some
| reasonable arguments for going away from ethernet since they
| weren't within the official spec which unfortunately maxes
| out too low for power [0]. But I wish that at least with the
| business one they'd simply separated out power and data at
| least as an option while keeping the terminal self contained.
|
| > _Now, CPE wireless stuff (like at &t fixed wireless) has
| ethernet ports, but you have to have bulk cat6 wire, the
| rj-45 connectors, and a crimper to "service" it._
|
| Or, you know, just get a preterminated shielded patch cable?
| Or for stuff SFP use fiber, again preterminated is fine.
| There is no downside to having this be easy for those who
| need it and the same for those who don't.
|
| ----
|
| 0: Though I'll edit to add that I've had people tell me
| they've powered them just fine with standard 100W PoE++
| injectors. It may be that either SpaceX is being generous
| with their claimed power needs, or the full power is only
| ever used for serious snow/ice melting with the heaters and
| is a worse case scenario that much of the planet will never
| need to think about. Of course that'd just remove even more
| justification for going proprietary.
| genewitch wrote:
| >Or, you know, just get a preterminated shielded patch
| cable?
|
| the rj-45 plastic part won't fit in the tiny hole for the
| cable. I'm unsure if you understood what i was talking
| about. outdoor ethernet requires a crimper, otherwise you
| can't guarantee water-resistance.
|
| I don't know anything about the "old" starlink stuff, i
| have the rectangular dish. the power and data are separate
| - unless you mean the cable going to the dish - in which
| case, the dongle splits out the ethernet from _that_ cable.
|
| I haven't tried to "dumb WAN" the starlink because it's
| outside the scope of my use. I don't even see the point of
| getting rid of the NAT at that spot, because it's still NAT
| upstream, and you're gunna need NAT on your network anyway,
| probably. I had this issue with 4g/LTE CPE, too. Once
| something goes CGNAT, there's no reason to use your own
| equipment, as it's getting a private address anyhow, and
| now you're approaching quadruple NAT territory.
| xoa wrote:
| > _I 'm unsure if you understood what i was talking
| about. outdoor ethernet requires a crimper, otherwise you
| can't guarantee water-resistance._
|
| No, it does not. I'm fairly sure you do not deal with
| outdoor networking of any kind, or you'd be more familiar
| with the myriad of solutions to this. The most basic of
| which are feeding a terminated cable through a tight
| rubber gasket of some kind, which then fits around the
| 8P8C port in some way, and is installed facing up. That
| is typically plenty for outdoor survivability short of
| full submersion, including driving rain storms, complete
| coverage in snow etc. Sometimes dielectric grease or the
| like may be added if it's going to be buried underground
| too. Like, this is a solved problem, for ages. Cheap PtP
| devices, outdoor WAPs, outdoor switches, ethernet
| extenders etc all handle this just fine. All of them use
| preterminated cables (of course you can make your own).
|
| > _the power and data are separate - unless you mean the
| cable going to the dish_
|
| Of course I meant the cable going to the terminal (dish).
| I want that in at least a pro/business terminal to have
| an option to use SFP directly so I can have the data go
| direct to fiber and power be separate, which as well as
| allowing far more range to the router has the added
| advantage of eliminating any surge or induced current
| considerations.
|
| > _I haven 't tried to "dumb WAN" the starlink because
| it's outside the scope of my use. I don't even see the
| point of getting rid of the NAT at that spot, because
| it's still NAT upstream, and you're gunna need NAT on
| your network anyway, probably. I had this issue with
| 4g/LTE CPE, too. Once something goes CGNAT, there's no
| reason to use your own equipment, as it's getting a
| private address anyhow, and now you're approaching
| quadruple NAT territory._
|
| I'd politely suggest you perhaps not be quite so
| confident about things you don't really use or
| understand.
| genewitch wrote:
| I'll just leave this here:
| https://i.imgur.com/Clz9pSu.png
|
| Since you ignored pretty much everything i said for
| whatever reason, i'll just say it again: it may be "just
| fine" in places that are don't have extreme humidity and
| temperature deltas between night and day. All i can tell
| you is i've installed PtP and PtMP sector antennas and
| "dishes", and if the power goes out for 2 nights, you're
| at least in for replacing some parts.
|
| It isn't _" the rain"_ that I/we worry about. Oddly, all
| the starlink stuff is heavily gasketed connectors. i
| wonder why they don't just use USB-C like some cameras,
| they could even face the connectors downward!
|
| As far as my last point - i said i don't see the _point_
| since starlink is CGNAT. It 's like putting a fiber cable
| to a cellphone for tethering. you get _no_ benefit. In
| the starlink app you can turn off DHCP and put your own
| junk behind it if you want - that is, if you want triple
| or quadruple NAT.
| bitbckt wrote:
| The extra Ethernet dongle is a silly extra expense in my view -
| I don't want their WiFi, I use the base station as a bridge
| between physical interfaces the same as a cable modem.
|
| I'm looking forward to the return of the port, too.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I was very surprised when our starlink showed up and I had to
| buy an Ethernet adapter! Extremely weird that they don't just
| have the port on the router.
| genewitch wrote:
| Is it really that surprising? there's two hardware pieces,
| both are rated for outdoor (permanent) use. I don't see a way
| to guarantee that sort of thing with a _user serviceable_
| ethernet port except the way they did it.
|
| I actually debated buying the longer dish wire vs leaving the
| thing outside, and made the decision to buy the longer cable
| and the ethernet port adapter, because i live in an area
| where sustained power outages longer than 24 hours _will_
| allow moisture ingress into any device left outside, and the
| higher the IP rating, the more likely this is to damage said
| device.
| zajio1am wrote:
| User serviceable ethernet port on outdoor antennas is
| standard on wifi devices. Just put it behind movable cover
| and direct it down, partially recessed in plastic case (so
| it is protected from flowing water, rain and snow). See
| e.g. https://www.wifihw.cz/img.asp?attid=4754
| genewitch wrote:
| that sort of thing works _great_ if you can guarantee
| power to the device, 24 /7. At least where i am. the
| moisture in the air at night will be pulled into the
| device, through whatever seals exist, if the device is
| unpowered. Then, during the day when the pressure inside
| the device increases (due to the seals), the extra air is
| released, but the condensation remains.
|
| here, it takes literally 2 nights without power to kill
| stuff like Wyze cameras, Solar powered spotlights, etc.
| and those don't have a half inch rectangular hole
| allowing ingress.
|
| I'm not saying that stuff like what you're talking about
| doesn't exist. I've installed relays that had "downward
| facing rj-45 behind a panel", on top of buildings... but
| the building had generator backup that we were
| shareholders in, as well as our own UPS systems that kept
| the POE enabled in the event the generator failed, but
| shut off all "data" to the radios, leaving them using
| idle power. If there were no generator, we'd have used a
| different type of radio on the roofs.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well the entire rest of my system is a Unifi mesh Wi-Fi
| system with two Ethernet ports on every outdoor rated
| device I am using so yes I found it very surprising.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| The current Wifi 5 one has an ethernet adapter they sell
| separately: https://www.starlink.com/specifications
|
| The upcoming Wifi 6 router will likely have ethernet ports
| built-in given the FCC spec: https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-
| preps-wi-fi-6-starlink-rou...
| KirillPanov wrote:
| The $2500 "high performance" (square, not rectangle) dish is a
| direct ethernet connection.
|
| They still use a proprietary connector (mainly for
| weatherproofing and durability reasons) and supply the power on
| different pairs than standard PoE (probably so people don't try
| to use their own PoE injector). But it's: dish
| -> PoE injector -> rj45 ethernet
|
| No wifi anywhere. Also no router, unless you count the dish
| itself. Each "->" is a cable.
|
| The dish->injector cable has proprietary connectors on both
| ends; the injector->rj45 cable has a proprietary connector on
| one end and an ordinary rj45 plug on the other end. Apparently
| this is done because the proprietary connectors are
| weatherproof and rj45 isn't, and people expect to be able to
| put the PoE injector outdoors.
|
| The proprietary connectors on the high performance dish are
| _slightly_ different from the ones on the cheap rectangular
| dish, so you can 't just use the proprietary->rj45 cable from a
| high performance dish with the cheap dish.
|
| Honestly I with Starlink would've just coughed up the few extra
| bucks it costs to use standard rj45 with a weatherproof shroud.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| I want to like Starlink, but there is no way the product can both
| continue to grow and also service customers at advertised speeds.
| It will literally only get slower over time. And it's already
| spotty.
| Retric wrote:
| Ultimately bandwidth per customer is just a revenue vs cost of
| each satellite question. They or a competitor can scale the
| number of LEO satellites and their mass basically indefinitely.
|
| Also inline traditional communication satellites these things
| have a short lifespan which means the network can see
| significant improvements over time as technology improves.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| From what I heard there is literally a cap on the number of
| signals that can be serviced per cell, extra satellites will
| not expand potential signals per cell, so you literally run
| out of how many people can be connected in a given area.
| Bandwidth is already limited and becomes moreso as the cell
| gets crowded.
| Retric wrote:
| Cell sizes can be shrunk it's really dependent of the
| technology involved. Starlink is currently tied to a
| specific technology stack but different providers can be
| using different frequencies etc.
|
| If you're looking for the ultimate limit you need to
| consider stuff like this 100Gbps optical link.
| https://news.mit.edu/2022/communications-system-achieves-
| fas.... That's not directly viable for home internet users,
| but an airline or cruse ship might be interested in such
| technologies.
| teleforce wrote:
| >SpaceX sells antennas with its service in a range from $2,500 to
| $150,000 each.
|
| What, a freaking antenna that cost about the same as Ferrari
| Enzo? Are we missing something here?
|
| Just wondering can a third party make and sell compatible
| Starlink antenna? Is it permissible?
|
| Anyway these HN threads have so many useful information, it feels
| like in a conference room with various Starlink stakeholders.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| It's for aircraft
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| You can get one for more money from DUJUD or Ball Aerospace.
|
| $150,000 is probably the cheapest in it's category
| teleforce wrote:
| Thanks for the info.
|
| In that case, it is possible and feasible to create a third
| party business making and selling cheaper antenna systems for
| the Starlink customers.
|
| As I've mentioned in my other comments, I suspect the
| decreased in manufacturing for the antenna price is not so
| much due to the SpaceX better manufacturing iterations,
| increase yield, etc but mainly due to the recent availability
| of the high speed Direct RF sampling transceivers that now
| encroaching Ku-band territory.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Amazon claim they'll be able to hit $400. In Ka band
|
| SpaceX spent $2.4 billion on dish R&D and production of 1
| million antennas upfront with ST Micro. That kind of
| commitment goes a long way.
|
| It's probably not. SpaceX doesn't have a separate modem.
| It's in the dish. These two companies got in via the
| military. OneWeb is in Ku band like starlink, they may be
| open to talk
| wongarsu wrote:
| Good for them. Bringing production costs from $3000 per terminal
| in 2020(?) to $1300 in early 2021 to less than $600 now is quite
| the achievement, and not subsidizing terminals will make rapid
| expansion a lot cheaper.
| [deleted]
| bklyn11201 wrote:
| Honest question: rapid expansion to where exactly? Are you
| thinking poorer, rural countries? E.g., with cheaper terminals
| Starlink will more aggressively sell to rural Brazil, Mexico,
| India, etc? If they can sell the terminal at cost, how low can
| they price the monthly service for these poorer countries to
| fill up unused capacity?
| fallingknife wrote:
| If they get 10 million subscribers at $120 per month, that's
| $14.4 billion per year which is way more than the cost of the
| network. And they can easily get 10 million in just the US
| and Canada. So they can price new subscribers in poorer
| countries at whatever price they need because the marginal
| cost to add to the network is near zero.
| soperj wrote:
| That math doesn't check out. 10,000,000 * $120 = $1.2
| billion per year.
| enigmurl wrote:
| $1.2 billion per month would be $14.4 billion per year
| lkbm wrote:
| Poorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my
| brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet
| as 2021.
|
| Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or
| whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can
| afford to advertise _way_ more than before. If they can pick
| up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that
| 's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever
| that's worth).
| jhallenworld wrote:
| This is an idiotic USA problem.
|
| For example, China claims:
|
| http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html
| ghaff wrote:
| My dad's (now brother's) house a few minutes outside a
| decently-sized town by Downeast Maine standards had a
| barely 1Mbps down "broadband" link and it was the last
| house on the road that could even get that. With Starlink,
| it's actually viable to work from there in addition to
| streaming video etc. Of course, he wouldn't pay literally
| any amount but he'd probably pay a lot; I would.
| lkbm wrote:
| Yeah, I suspect they could have gotten my brother to pay
| the old full cost plus extra. Still, many people in rural
| areas aren't willing/able to drop $1k on Internet setup,
| so keeping costs down is worth more than gouging a few
| remote software engineers.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly. I'm sure there's a correlation between poor
| wired broadband and lower income even if it's not
| perfect. But Starlink is a game changer for a lot of
| people who otherwise can't get decent wired Internet--
| and, especially if you can't get wired broadband, the
| options are mostly pretty bad. Probably changing some
| with 5G but still not ideal for many people.
| slashdev wrote:
| For my parents it's replaced their cable internet which was
| slower and less reliable. I wish I could get it where I live
| in a city apartment. The internet is usually fast, but not
| reliable.
|
| The only way to have satellite in an tall apartment building
| is to put it on the roof, which is complicated.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm always kind of puzzled by this question. There are like
| 7-8 billion humans. Millions of ships, planes, farm machines
| and other equipment.
|
| Expansion will happen in all direction at the same time, in
| all market. In very poor country a single village might share
| one antenna. All the way to very expensive antennas for
| military aircraft.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There's an additional consideration regarding the price, that
| poor places can probably share one terminal among one or more
| villages, thus distributing the cost.
|
| Another possibility is distributing costs by using Starlink
| as backhaul. India for example already has very cheap high
| speed mobile data, so a telecom company could spread out the
| costs of terminals and service (maybe even get a better deal
| for bulk usage) while simplifying and strengthening their own
| infrastructure for remote or disaster-prone areas.
|
| Plus, for SpaceX, any point where a satellite is inactive is
| money left on the table, so they should have significant
| price flexibility for places which can't afford the current
| service fees but can afford something that is more than the
| cost of bandwidth at the downlink station.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Sattelite communication is generally more expensive than
| cable or cell towers. Though about 70% of the earth is
| unsuitable for these solutions. Alot of commercial boats are
| still on very low bandwith connections but could potentially
| benefit from higher bandwidth if only to make video calls or
| netflix more available for a similar or higher price. Then
| there are alot of smaller, private, boats that would benefit
| from sattelite communication if costs werent prohibitive.
| panick21_ wrote:
| If think the competitiveness of sats changes quite a bit
| once you have really mass produced sats and the Starship.
|
| It will like not beat earth bound stuff in many scenarios,
| but it will be closer then it was in the past.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| Starlink is not yet ubiquitous even in western countries (EU,
| UK, US, Can, ...). I believe the rapid expansion meant
| becoming more ubiquitous in western countries and commercial
| operations (shipnav, etc).
|
| They have a long, long way to go before even talking about
| developing countries which already are densely populated and
| mostly have fast, cheap internet already.
| nico wrote:
| I live in the LA-metro area, 15min away from downtown LA This
| is a pretty dense urban area, and we can only get Spectrum,
| which goes down at least once a month for hours at a time, in
| the middle of the day
|
| The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for
| $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks
|
| Had a similar issue when living in SF
|
| Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small
| cities, only have one (crappy) vendor
|
| I'm no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there's definitely a
| market for them in well established, densely populated areas
| in rich countries
| htss2013 wrote:
| Adding "I'm not fan of Musk" is odd here. Is this some kind
| of tribal signal? It's like writing about the market for
| new AWS services, preceded by "I'm no fan of Bezos but..."
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| It's not odd. Musk had a big cult-like following, even on
| HN. Bezos did not.
| WalterBright wrote:
| [flagged]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Civics and industry co-exist in a healthy society. Musk
| has consistently demonstrated that he has no civic sense
| and, when injured, will randomly lash out at whoever the
| hecklers around him tell him to lash out at.
|
| That's not a quality that's worth celebrating, regardless
| of how much innovation he might enable. We can and should
| expect better of people, especially extraordinarily
| wealthy and powerful ones.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > he has no civic sense
|
| What about the civic sense of proving that great electric
| cars can be made at a profit, space launch costs can be
| cut 90%, and Starlink can enable communications by people
| who live under oppression?
|
| Doesn't actually _doing_ things that _matter_ to the
| human race matter _far_ more than saying comforting words
| and avoiding giving offense?
| Clubber wrote:
| He's had the news mauling him for the past 2-3 years, I
| understand people kinda just regurgitate it.
| [deleted]
| threeseed wrote:
| [flagged]
| WalterBright wrote:
| His accomplishments are enormous - showing how to make
| electric cars at a profit, and cutting the cost of space
| launches by 90%. And now Starlink, too.
|
| Standing up for free speech includes standing up for the
| right to express ideas you don't like. I'm sure he'll
| allow you to post your opinions, too.
|
| Suppressing free speech is the first step towards
| tyranny.
| hidl wrote:
| [flagged]
| pensatoio wrote:
| > I'm no fan of Starlink or Musk
|
| He's the driving force behind some of the greatest
| innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt
| many people can say they've had greater impact or could
| withstand the same scrutiny.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > ...or could withstand the same scrutiny.
|
| Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but
| mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with
| a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to
| repeatedly commit securities fraud.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| People would have a much better opinion of him if he
| stuck to realising crazy projects (an electric car thats
| faster than a supercar, reusable rockets, solar panels
| that look like normal roof tiles...) and kept his
| questionable political opinions to himself.
| threeseed wrote:
| Everyone is free to have their political opinions.
|
| The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being
| manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g.
| taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and
| deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to
| drive engagement.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Weird... Here in Barcelona I can get fibre from 3 different
| providers (with actually separate networks at street
| level).
| [deleted]
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The reason they specified sparsely populated areas is that
| Starlink is designed for sparsely populated areas. In a
| denser area the performance would drop drastically because
| you'd need far higher satellite density to sufficiently
| distribute the load.
| asynchronous wrote:
| It's actually not the satellites as the bottleneck
| typically from what I understand, it's the ground
| stations that serve those areas getting too congested.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| The satellites may not currently be the bottleneck for
| certain areas, but they definitely don't support anything
| resembling a densely or even sparsely populated area.
|
| Typical calculations (using only publicly available info
| as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink
| constellation supporting a really low density of
| antennas.
|
| If you want the details, the person who created
| starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible
| calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is
| under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread
| combined".
|
| Basically, the result is that starlink could support
| around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps,
| where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1
| terminal per 17 square km.
|
| If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for
| ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not
| really that impressive when you compare it to the density
| and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly
| helps out the small number of people way out there.
|
| 0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-
| capacity-843b2387f5...
| esskay wrote:
| If they can get the interconnect working that issue goes
| away (its mostly groundstation bandwidth limiting
| things).
|
| The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send
| the traffic across to a satellite close to the final
| destination, that should in theory help massively
| redistribute the ground station traffic.
|
| It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to
| be shared there but using a combination of some clever
| routing you could theoretically spread traffic across
| multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal
| latency impact.
| labcomputer wrote:
| That _may_ be true with current space vehicles, but
| there's no fundamental reason that two or more SVs can't
| form a distributed phased array (for MIMO a la WiFi). At
| least from a physics / spectrum perspective. The
| engineering might be tricky.
|
| With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width
| would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be
| effectively infinite.
| rini17 wrote:
| The distributed array will however share one link and
| satellites don't have unlimited capacity either.
|
| Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting
| vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling
| stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to
| improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I've never heard anyone complain about filling the
| stratosphere with metal oxides, do you have somewhere I
| can read more about this risk? Naively, I would have
| expected that even thousands of 250kg satellites would be
| insignificant on the scale of the whole stratosphere
| (we're not talking about surface-level CO2, where we're
| pumping out gigatons per year), but I have no idea what
| that ecosystem is like. Is the metal oxide concentration
| measurable?
|
| I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP
| monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just
| get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down
| hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws
| will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with
| fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure
| build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but
| right now they can just collude together and lobby
| against changing the status quo.
|
| I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and
| intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably
| easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite
| constellation ever than by playing politics against some
| of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
| Clubber wrote:
| "Space junk," was a boogie man the news threw at the wall
| and didn't quite stick. Many of the pictures/diagrams of
| the satellites made them appear about 1000x bigger than
| they actually are.
|
| Example:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-
| jun...
|
| Beware the murder hornets!
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-
| was...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Compare the CO2 emissions of launching a satellite with
| the CO2 emissions of digging trenches.
| cozzyd wrote:
| The right thing to compare it to is building a cell tower
| anderspitman wrote:
| How would you synchronize them?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Each satellite has N routers, and can support a certain
| bandwidth. Even if you hardwired a long LAN cable to it,
| more users drops the speed.
| wayfinder wrote:
| I imagine the total cost of installation and ongoing
| maintenance of all the infrastructure required for this
| proposed setup for a substantial amount of urban users
| dwarfs the equivalent total cost of just installing new
| cabling and the lobbying required to get that done,
| especially over a 20 year period.
| jtchang wrote:
| Don't underestimate lobbying costs in dense urban areas.
| Whenever you have to deal with people the alternative is
| often easier.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Hadn't heard of that concept before, sounds pretty
| interesting! Will have to read up on it more.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Apple is offering satellite phone service. Starlink shown
| it's important in the Ukraine-Russia war. There is Starshield
| for the government uses. Whatever shortcoming of current
| telecommunication, Starlink can supplement it.
| sp332 wrote:
| Apple is offering emergency satellite _text_ service.
| rightbyte wrote:
| In only one direction too right? I e. you don't know if
| the message has been received?
| V99 wrote:
| You do, you can try it with updating your find my
| location without an actual emergency. It tells you where
| to point/hold and when it's done.
|
| The emergency texting is also 2-way.
| jaywalk wrote:
| No, it's bidirectional.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| It's two-way: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426
|
| "Once you're connected, your iPhone starts a text
| conversation with emergency responders by sharing
| critical information [...]
|
| You might be asked to respond to additional messages.
| Only Latin characters (such as English or French) are
| supported in these messages. [...]"
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ok, nice, then my colleague got it wrong.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| [flagged]
| taftster wrote:
| StarShield came out of that though, which might be a
| legitimate compromise. e.g. governments purchase
| StarShield and then just do whatever they want with the
| constellation.
|
| I don't disagree with your sentiments here. But if you've
| got a service and it's being used for war (regardless of
| whose side you're on or how patriotic you are), it's not
| abusive (from my perspective) to just opt out providing
| service. If Musk is completely a pacifist, which I doubt
| but let's go with it, then StarShield might end up being
| a reasonable compromise.
| katbyte wrote:
| Decided. He has already blocked their use
| https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/9/13/russias-
| putin-p...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That turned out to be yet another instance of CNN lying
| about/acting on insufficient/poor information and has
| since been walked back by the very person that made the
| original allegation. Confusingly in direct contradiction
| with supposed excerpts from his book.
|
| Isn't even the first time they falsely alleged that
| SpaceX shut down Starlink to cause Ukraine trouble and
| failed to follow up with a correction as loudly as they
| made the original claims.
|
| https://twitter.com/WalterIsaacson/status/170034224229090
| 136...
| realusername wrote:
| I'm also not sure the financial aspect is going to work.
| There's not many developed countries without proper fiber
| rollout and very poor countries likely can't support the high
| infrastructure cost. You're left after that with marginal use
| cases (boat, remote places...) which won't be enough either.
|
| There's a reason why the comments are mentioning rural US,
| because it's a clear outlier among the developped world.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| The developing world is typically unequal, not universally
| poor. There are a lot of people in Africa and South America
| who would get drastically improved internet with Starlink,
| and can actually afford it.
| realusername wrote:
| I'm sure you can find such places, is there enough of
| them to fund the service which is very expensive? That
| I'm not so sure.
|
| When people are richer, they also tend to live in
| countries where the internet access is very important to
| the state and where installing good internet is an
| important public policy.
|
| Of course you have exceptions to that general case but
| I'm not convinced those exceptions are enough by
| themselves.
|
| They are in a very different market than a traditional
| product, they are basically servicing the people that
| nobody else want to service and the distribution of
| revenue in that group is going to be drastically
| different from the norm.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| They're rapidly launching more and more capacity. The new v2
| mini satellites are more than twice as big as the v1.5
| satellites, which themselves are not yet totally in service.
|
| And as they improve the cost of terminals, there's no
| fundamental limit in the amount of capacity for a given
| frequency allocation. Geometric multiplexing is only limited
| by the number and cost of the phased array elements.
|
| So rapid expansion everywhere.
|
| And then launching the full sized v2 Starlink satellites on
| Starship will account for another ~2-2.5x increase in size
| compared to the v2 minis. Then comes FCC approval for the
| full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous
| as their current constellation, which itself only is about
| half filled.
|
| So they have about a factor of 100 capacity expansion in the
| pipeline, and they can increase the satellite size even
| further due to Starship's low costs. They can expand a lot,
| even in existing countries. Lots of people are on waiting
| lists due to capacity being filled up in many regions.
| wbl wrote:
| Phased arrays aren't magic. The sharpness of the aperture
| depends on the physical extent of the antenna and very
| sharp mainlobes come with additional sidelobes.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Of course.
| SEJeff wrote:
| > Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation
| which is about 5 times as numerous as their current
| constellation, which itself only is about half filled.
|
| SpaceX has launched just under 5,100 Starlink satellites to
| orbit, of which a single digit percentage have either been
| deorbited for testing, failure, solar storm knocking them
| out, etc. Their current constellation total size is
| approved to be around 12,000 satellites. They've been
| working to get additional approvals up to 42,000
| satellites.
| xeromal wrote:
| Large swaths of the US have bunk internet like Earthlink. My
| rural family in Appalachia already like Musk. I think they'd
| love to have Starlink if it was a little more affordable.
| qup wrote:
| Earthlink still exists?
|
| Wow. When I was a kid, we would steal "ELN" accounts for
| dial-up and then hop on to AOL via TCP/IP.
|
| Edit: we did that so when we got punted we didn't have to
| go throigh the whole dial-up sequence. Which happened a lot
| in those days if you were twelve years old.
| xeromal wrote:
| I miss the early days of the internet.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| My psychiatrist still has an Earthlink email address. I
| started seeing him in 1991 and we still talk 30 minutes
| every 4 months just for lulz.
| Loughla wrote:
| We live in a very rural area. The one time the federal
| government really came through for me was fiber development
| grants a few years ago.
|
| We went from Wild Blue internet, which was garbage all
| around, for $120/mo to a full gig fiber connection locked
| in at $80/mo for life. It cost us $200 to hook it up.
|
| More and more rural isp's are getting into fiber with
| grants.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| And SpaceX was going to get some of that grant money as
| well. But they messed it up somehow.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| They very well may still get it
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Near term naval and aircraft. Regarding rural third world:
| the thing about a satellite is it is basically going around
| in a circle. If the business plan was built around being
| profitable over the first world then everywhere not over the
| first world is basically free because you have to build
| whatever bandwidth you want to provide the first world around
| the entire orbital ring.
| [deleted]
| starbase wrote:
| Friend in a developing country has Starlink, he says the dish
| is about $100 cheaper there and service is just under $50 per
| month.
| politician wrote:
| I'd buy service to put it on my rooftop to both put economic
| pressure on the local ISP duopoly in the form of an
| unambiguous publicly visible third alternative and, also, as
| a backup.
| SEJeff wrote:
| This is part of why I bought a Starlink dish and put it on
| the roof of the house I'm doing a full rehab on before the
| siding was installed. It will give me dual homed internet
| for when the crap local ISP has issues and a hedge against
| a single ISP with spotty service.
|
| Ironically, in doing this, I have managed to meet and
| convince a project manager of a new ISP to add our
| neighborhood to the list to places to pull fiber to, but it
| will likely be about a year out.
| jtriangle wrote:
| I know of a couple places that are using starlink as
| failover because they're only serviced by a single ISP.
| Makes sense really, and cheaper than 4/5g failover.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| As far as I know, the terminals were mainly so expensive due to
| the large phased array antenna. I wonder if these cost reductions
| are mainly from managing to produce them cheaply and if that
| might be valuable as a commoditized phased array for other
| applications.
| scld wrote:
| I would be surprised if the older, higher costs didn't include
| broker fees for scarce ICs in the supply shortage. I'm sure
| they've gone through a few revisions but part of that cost drop
| is simply price of components dropping.
| cfcosta wrote:
| I also imagine they can work with cheaper antennas now that
| they have many more satellites on orbit.
| starbase wrote:
| Parts count has gone way down. Gen 1 terminals used something
| like 80 beamformer ICs with 8 frontend ICs for each one. 700+
| chips on the board.
|
| Gen 3 runs 16 beamformers with 2 frontends each.
| carabiner wrote:
| The F-22's APG-77 phased array radar became cheaper when one
| key component became a commercial off the shelf part for wifi
| routers.
| teleforce wrote:
| I'm curious, can you share the name of that particular key
| component?
| carabiner wrote:
| No idea unfortunately. I think I read this a long time ago
| possibly from a Bill Sweetman report.
| teleforce wrote:
| Thanks for the clue, apparently it's the GaAs MMIC
| technology according to the ChatGPT-4 [1]. I've should
| have figured it out in the first place due to my previous
| research work of Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology that
| now become the successor to GaAs technology due to high
| power Radar requirements. I suppose this is where ChatGPT
| become really handy for research, as Google is extremely
| useful for search.
|
| Similarly with LIDAR, the autonomous vehicles demand has
| made the LIDAR sensor now become very affordable for the
| masses.
|
| [1] ChatGPT-4 response:
|
| "The key component of the F-22's APG-77 phased array
| radar that was made cheaper by Wi-Fi technologies,
| according to Bill Sweetman's reports, is the Gallium
| Arsenide (GaAs) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit
| (MMIC) technology. This technology was significantly
| reduced in cost due to its widespread use in commercial
| Wi-Fi systems, allowing the defense industry to leverage
| economies of scale and reduce the overall cost of
| producing the radar system for the F-22 Raptor."
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The array itself no, because the size of the elements is a
| function of the transmit frequency.
|
| The driver IC's, perhaps.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| related news, ars article quotes WSJ article,
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/spacex-projected...:
|
| "A 2015 presentation that "SpaceX used to raise money from
| investors" reportedly projected that in 2022, Starlink would hit
| 20 million subscribers and generate nearly $12 billion in revenue
| and $7 billion in operating profit. The WSJ said it obtained the
| 2015 presentation and recent documents with numbers on Starlink's
| actual performance in 2022.
|
| Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222
| million in 2021, according to the report. The documents
| apparently didn't specify whether Starlink is profitable."
| dmix wrote:
| You _always_ make pie in the sky projections when raising money
| in the very early days.
|
| Still a $1.4 billion (in revenue) dollar company with a real
| business model and market dominance _shrugs_
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's cool, for sure. But until they stop selling a dollar for
| 90c, then they don't have real business model.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _until they stop selling a dollar for 90c, then they don
| 't have real business model_
|
| Starlink is glued to a transport monopoly. It doesn't take
| much imagination to see how economies of scale on
| production and marketing make those numbers work.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Amazon sold a dollar for 90 cents for 20 years, and I don't
| see anyone laughing now. It's not a bad business model for
| a massive fixed cost but minimal marginal cost business
| like Starlink.
| justapassenger wrote:
| It does have minimal marginal cost, as long as you live
| in the right place on earth, without many other customers
| next to you.
|
| Once you exceed, fairly limited amount of people that can
| use it one cell, you need to grow massively your fixed
| cost, as you need to grow the whole constellation or just
| won't be able to grow.
|
| Time will tell if that will add up. I don't think it's
| obvious it will.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Given my observation of the space and EV industry in the last 5
| years, this seems downright reasonable.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The criticism chain for Elon Musk's ventures is usually "It's
| impossible! This is a scam!" -> "He promised he would have X
| five years ago!" -> "He has too much money / power / a
| monopoly! Something has to be done!"
| _Microft wrote:
| A prediction made seven years into the future, for a service
| which didn't exist then, only off by an order of magnitude
| doesn't sound too bad imo.
| arbuge wrote:
| Quite correct. Less than 2 years off from that timeline if it
| continues with its current growth rate.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| Sporting a growth rate that, if it holds, means the
| prediction was off only by a couple of years.
| b59831 wrote:
| [dead]
| xoa wrote:
| Additionally, holy _crap_ has a lot changed in that time.
| Falcon 9 didn 't complete its first landing until the very
| end of 2015 with Flight 20. What's now routine and key to
| their costs is a feat less than a decade old. SpaceX was
| still talking about the Mars transport/BFR at that, which
| were very different in a variety of ways from the Starship
| SS/SH system we see now. What they've got now feels a lot
| more practical and sustainable long term, moving to steel for
| example was a great change.
|
| So as far as long term forward looking plans go I'd agree
| that execution here was pretty darn good, and they've got a
| very clear roadmap for the next 5 years as well with full
| size v2 sats waiting in the wings and Starship proceeding
| along at a solid clip. It was a curiously negative feeling
| piece particularly for the WSJ. How many companies execute
| ambitious highly capital intensive global scale
| infrastructure rollouts using never been done combos of tech
| at never been done price points and pull it off like that?
| pavon wrote:
| 60 million people live in rural areas in the US, over 40
| million of those already have broadband at home[1], and less
| than 2 million people subscribed to satellite internet before
| Starlink launched[2]. His projection of 20 million
| subscribers would have meant that literally every single
| rural individual who didn't already have broadband would sign
| up for Starlink within a couple years of being available.
| Okay, that's not entirely fair because Starlink does business
| in more than just the US, but still, that was an
| unrealistically aggressive projection even 7 years ago.
|
| I think Starlink is doing great, but Musk's projections are
| notoriously bad, and there is no reason to defend them.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/19/some-
| digi...
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181020011542/https://www.st
| ron...
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| The world is a big place. With billions of people
| fallingknife wrote:
| This is misleading for several reasons. The FCC defines
| broadband as 25/3 mbit up/down, which is not fast. Also it
| doesn't take into account latency which is a major problem
| with geostationary satellites. So plenty of those 40
| million with "broadband" are going to want to switch to
| better service anyway.
|
| Your first article concedes as much:
|
| > Even though rural areas are more wired today than in the
| past, current infrastructure does not support consistently
| dependable broadband access in many rural areas. This lack
| of reliable high-speed internet access has come to the
| forefront of discussions about navigating remote work and
| school during the coronavirus pandemic.
|
| Your second link states that there are 1.7 million
| satellite internet subscribers in the US. But Starlink
| already has that many subscribers, so it is clear that the
| market size is much more than just existing satellite
| users.
| pavon wrote:
| Even if 100% of rural customers were dissatisfied with
| their existing service, projecting that you will capture
| a third of the potential market within a few years of
| providing service is unrealistically aggressive.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| There's always a guy in these threads and this time it's me.
|
| Sure wish they had an a-la-cart option. We're in the Trailer 6
| weeks a year, over 5 trips, and starlink internet access is $150
| a month, for the full month.
|
| This isn't unique to starlink, if I need any kind of bandwidth,
| it's $80 for a 100gb month of Verizon.
|
| I'm already paying for tethering on the AT&T phones, and Comcast
| at home. This stuff really adds up if you're doing any kind of
| travel.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Do you mean an option to pay per Gb of usage, rather than
| monthly?
|
| At least its a possible offering now that they won't be losing
| money on the terminal (thus necessitating predictable time-to-
| recover via monthly subscription).
|
| That said, I wouldn't hold my breath. There are good reasons
| very few businesses offer that option alongside monthly plans.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I'd be good for that, but those situations generally end up
| being more expensive than just buying a month.
|
| Not only that, it's trivially easy to have a single poorly
| choked device blow through a cap. (e.g. one laptop decides it
| wants to download paath updates...the Tier you have is $60
| for 25gb or $80 for 100gb...or, you know, $150 for uncapped
| starlink.)
|
| The amount of brainspace required to have reliable internet
| access in an RV is crazy....and it won't be cheap.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Sounds like a secondary market opportunity. Keep 20 Starlink
| subscriptions, rent them out for a few days at a time at
| $8/day. $600 deposit on the antenna.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I'm betting that's all sewn up in a click-wrap EULA
| somewhere.
| davidktr wrote:
| Funny, just two hours ago I saw my first Starlink satellite train
| running across the sky. It felt spooky and futuristic at the same
| time.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Strange - I see them on sale for $199 CAD.
|
| They seem to be sprouting from off-grid cabins around here. I'm
| posting from one right now via Starlink :)
| mortureb wrote:
| Starlink was good but not for me because I was surrounded by
| trees. I had an interruption every 3 mins. Sometimes for a
| couple of seconds and sometimes for a few minutes. There's no
| disruption when you're streaming things but it makes video
| calls almost impossible which is what I needed the most for my
| job. Ended up keeping starlink _and_ reenabling my Viasat
| system just for the video calls. I have a wired fiber
| connection now and it's heaven.
| pnpnp wrote:
| A hack I've seen people do is to mount Starlink to the top of
| a tall tree (and cut the very top off the tree).
|
| It has a built-in IMU, and can tolerate some ridiculous
| amount of sway since the phased array antenna can steer the
| beam so quickly.
| mortureb wrote:
| Yeah I considered it but the trees around my house were
| 70-80 ft high so it wasn't trivial.
| downrightmike wrote:
| If you have the will to resell, you could do a WISP:
| https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-
| isp-f....
| pixl97 wrote:
| What something sales for and what something costs are two
| completely different things.
|
| Quite often game consoles sell for less than the cost of
| production, they make it back on the games/services you buy.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Yes, but the point of the article is that they aren't doing
| this any more.
|
| I'm pointing out that's not true if you live in certain
| places.
|
| https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/05/03/starlink-hardware-
| sale-70...
|
| "SpaceX's satellite internet platform currently has its
| hardware on sale for $199 for rural Canadians, down from the
| usual $759."
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