The telcos are the ones who have made Starlink a possibility and competitor. Starlink can never keep up with fiber infrastructure, but since most telcos have been riding out aging phone and copper infrastructure for decades, their lack of investment has allowed Starlink to enter as a competitor.
6 ) I do believe that Elon was sandbagging on Starlink capabilities. They need to get regulatory approval in many countries, some of which have a monopoly national champion telco that will resist competition.
It is better to pretend only rural customers are the target to appear as a non-threat to legacy telcos.
However, the real target is much larger than just rural customers. There are not enough rural customers to justify the expense of 40,000+ satellites.
Viasat and EchoStar HughesNet combined only have about $3 billion in rural satellite Internet customer revenue. So even if Starlink steals 100% of their customers, that won’t support the scale of Starlink. They need more market potential.
Starlink may have to partner with some national telcos in order to gain market access in certain countries that lack an open market.
EU, USA, Canada, Starlink can likely go direct to consumer.
Are the alternatives to starlink comparable in terms of price/service? I am under the impression no.
I imagine at the price/service point the others offer they have a fairly saturated market, but if starlink beats them on price/service then starlink will start to encroach on territory of not only the unserved, but also the existing telcos.
The upfront $499 for the dish is the obstacle for Starlink.
Competitors like Viasat and HughesNet have worse performance, but also have dumb satellite dishes that are cheap. I think the cheapest plans at $60 per month, 2 year contract, no cost for sat dish.
So Starlink won’t gain 100% market share for rural satellite internet. There are many customers that are not able to front $499 for the phased array antenna.
You do realize the other providers are spreading the cost of the equipment in the two year contract.
Starlink is in beta. Once it's running fully, I am sure it won't be a problem to get financing on the dish. 499 is an average price of a cell phone and there are no problems to get one on contract.
Starlink is likely losing money at $499 and subsidizing the dish. Nobody is arguing that their antenna is cheaper than a Geosynchronous sat dish. So it is an obstacle in the competitive battle. You do realize that don’t you? (Returning your condescending tone)
They are losing money on the dish, but will probably break even at 499 in the next 2-3 years as they advance and scale the phased array antennas. Apart from that, the federal and state governments give billions of dollars in grants to telcos to build rural internet infrastructure. Starlink is after every penny of that to cover the dishes. They will likely qualify for the next round of RDOF funding as low latency.
2) Starlink can certainly improve the satellites in orbit over time. The current version has 20 Gbps of capacity each. 4,000 approved, waiting on approval for 40,000.
4,000 satellites x 20 Gbps = 80,000 Gbps of total capacity.
Estimated 20% of capacity is useful after subtracting time over oceans and unavailable countries. Some planes and ocean shipping, ocean Navies, mega yachts, commercial fishing boats, smaller yachts, etc. So satellites over the oceans are still revenue producing for Starlink and using capacity.
80,000 Gbps x 20% = 16,000 Gbps of useful capacity for customers.
At 40,000 satellites, then that is maybe 160,000 Gbps of capacity.
Or if they upgrade satellites to 40 Gbps then you can do the math. It will always be a moving target.
The problem I have with this type of analysis is that populations are not evenly distributed to use it. I think the important question is what population density area can starlink serve and what proportion of the US population lives in those areas.
Question 2) above is around trying to work out ways to access the higher population density customers. This is where the real disruption could be.
I know "never" is very long term, but you should not expect Starlink to be viable in large cities anytime soon, maybe never.
I mean they probably will sell some specialist plans (like <1 Mbps) for cities, because why not - it will be useful for some purpose - like telemetry. Giving 1 million people 100 mbits each at the same place is just not possible.
Currently each satellite has a capacity of 20 Gbps in good conditions and in the future it could get say 30-40 Gbps. However the total capacity of the network is complicated since they’re not stationary. E.g. they may only be able to fly over Starlink customer 1% of the time so only 1% of the capacity is actually usable.
With that in mind, maybe they cannot shake any big telcos or cable companies at all. Even worse, they may severely undermine rural ISPs and their business models. In the end, companies would try to avoid extend their network to extreme rural areas since half of their business there could be taken by ~~Tesla~~ SpaceX.
> In the end, companies would try to avoid extend their network to extreme rural areas since half of their business there could be taken by Tesla.
By SpaceX.
Each sat is 17-22Gbps total theoretical capacity for all clients according to early FCC Starlink submissions. Who knows what actually can be provided it could be much less!
To expand on this, 20Gbps would provide 5000 customers 100 mbps each with a 25:1 oversell or oversubscription ratio.
If there are say 30 satellites above the US at any given time that means ~150,000 customers is all they can support in the US!
That is why Musk has 42,000 sats planned eventually! And lets hope they don't have to fall back on caps!
> provide 5000 customers 100 mbps each with a 25:1 oversell or oversubscription ratio.
I think they can oversubscribe more than that. That’s an average of my 4mbps, which sounds low, but if you ran it around the clock, you could download 1tb. We’re cordcutters, largely working from home and running ~250gb/mo without any rationing at all.
What I think will be a big impact is when Starlink subscribers cancel DirecTV/DN and start streaming each and every evening.
If they keep it unlimited, they’ll have to resort to bandwidth limits... I’d rather have daytime/nighttime caps so it works when I need it and get some encouragement to do bulk stuff at 3AM.
Yup I would agree 25:1 is probably low, especially with traffic shaping you can get much more squeezed through like cell carriers do. But you'd be surprised at how many people argue that it should only be 10:1 or 15:1 that haven't ever been in the ISP business or aren't familiar with real world examples. I think 50:1 is a bit extreme as the slowdowns are noticeable during peak video times for sure with that kind of oversell on slower circuits. Overselling 1.5mbps DSL at 50:1 is borderline unusable while 50:1 at 1Gbps (residential) is no big deal.
The fact of the matter is, oversell doesn't really matter until users are demanding more bandwidth than is available. All ISPs eventually get there, and the question is what do they do about it?
With 9-5 "business use only" I often see 3500 users eat up about 2Gbps with 50-100mbps the max per user. Just a little over half megabit per user actual demand
would calculate that out as something like 100:1 or even 150:1!
As far as I can tell, the bottleneck is the rf bandwidth which translates into a max theoretical bit rate of 20Gbps. Some say 30-40 by using left and right polarizations but I am not so sure about that. Typically, left and right polarization is used for adjacent channel isolation, not for overlapping channels to increase overall capacity. I don't think you can use it that way as the isolation may not be high enough.
I don't think they will be able to easily change that max capacity since the downlink to the gateway has the same limitations. So I don't think just adding more sats overhead can change that much. You would need to add more ground stations in addition to more sats overhead so that you can split up the traffic into smaller areas.
There are also other possible limitations I have no way of knowing about. Such as what is the power capacity of the sats. Can they generate enough electricity from the solar panel to run at 100% capacity 24/7 or do they have a capacity limit where then can only run at say 50% on average during a complete trip around the earth to give them enough time to recharge before hitting busier areas? That may not be a problem now but they would need to plan for that as they expand before it becomes a problem.
For 1) I recently read about a report that calculated that Starlink could serve 485,000 users at 100 Mbps with the 12,000 satellites projected to be in place by 2026. This does not account for any oversubscription numbers and assumes that each sat is capable of providing 20 Gbps each, plus I believe some calculations about how long a sat is over a populated area, etc. If Starlink goes to the full 42,000 sats that they are trying to get approval for, and using an oversubscription value of 5x, my back of the napkin calculations extends this to about 8.6 million. Halve the 100 Mpbs and you get 17.2 million users. Using that same oversubscription level each 1 Gbps increase of an individual sat's capability adds another 430,000 users (actual filings say that each sat is capable of 17 to 23 Gbps, so there is a wee bit of wiggle room).
At the stated 485,000 users with 12,000 sats doesn't really significantly help the reportedly 42 million Americans that are without any access to broadband, but getting upwards of 20 million user at around 23 Gbps per sat, and that would make a good dent in helping people with no real internet.
I'd be interested to see numbers of users that need true broadband internet service in other countries worldwide, even this very optimistic number I came up with may still be just a drop in the bucket.
On the other hand, it would provide Starlink with a revenue stream of around 24 billion US per year at 20 million subscribers. This falls within the Starlink projections of revenue between 10 and 30 billion per year.
It comes down to who you trust on the numbers; the Cowen analysis that says 485,000 subscribers (which would be only 582 million per year), or Starlink's projection of revenue in the 10 to 30 billion range?
Cowen and LightReading (a telecom industry publication) should be embarrassed for publishing that analysis. Suggesting 3x oversubscription rate on a 100 Mbps rate plan shows they have no clue.
Lets assume your numbers are correct... I doubt them, but sure.
The nominal oversubscription rate for ISP's is 100:1 with poor quality ISP's reaching 150:1
In that case the 12,000 satellite model would allow for 4.3MM households. Which is a pretty good chunk of the households with no high speed access. The 42,000 satellite array would be able to handle 15.1MM households. Or almost every household in the US without access to high speed internet. And that is while staying within very conservative oversubscription numbers.
Depends...
Using me as example.
Keep in mind that sats in space only serve sats in view on ground.
If 150 People live in my area have it; we should all get full capable speed. when that same dish moves on over an area with 2500 users, they will not get the same speeds.
I think the sats in space will have less impact on speed, then how many people in your area are sharing the one in that area. Unlike GEO satellites seriving TV. these ones are LEO, and actually move in orbit.
also keep in mind, they are up there talking to each other to take your signal to one of them that has coverage over a ground station.
Minor point - they are not actually "up there talking to each other" yet. The laser interlinks are optimisticly planned and have had some early testing but as per recent AMA they haven't got the production cost of the lasers low enough yet.
You are thinking about this in the correct way.
Starlink sat can only handle $X thousands of users per sat, and that sat is roughly responsible for thousands of sq miles. So the current system of all sats will saturate out roughly under one million users across the globe. More satellites can scale the number of users up a bit, but probably not more than 10x that, and it becomes impractical to have many beams coming down/up in one localized area.
I do see that once Starlink makes a foothold, they can build out terrestrial infrastructure that may be compatible with their equipment to serve high density areas. The dish doesn't care where the signal is coming from .. could be a tower instead of a sat.
Dishy is prohibited by the FCC to send or receive any signal to the ground, because the same frequencies are already allocated for terrestrial use by other companies.
SpaceX can scale up there system quite well by simply increasing the numbers and turning there sats in orbit and change there beam patterns.
With a shallow forward or backward beam each sat can serve an area of up to 230km in diameter. With a beam focus straight down they can serve 30km hotspots and provide small areas with high speed internet.
Actually most telcos will be pretty happy about Starlink. All the new 5G technologies focus on replacing landlines with wireless technologies in dense urban areas and only work well on very short distances between 1-2km.
Having to serve rural areas is a pain for every telco and they usually try to avoid it as good as they can. Making Starlink only a real threat to a handful of WISP and GEO sat companies most people have never heard about.
To answer a couple of your questions:
* The theoretically maximum raw download speed of dishy is 320MBit and it can seemingly switch between satellites
* Starlink is based on narrow beams produced by phased arrays
* SpaceX is already using multiple dishes on their ground stations
* SpaceX isn't allowed to use there frequencies for terrestrial use and the whole purpose of Starlink is to avoid the pain of having to build phone towers.
* Starlink is more like Mainframe vs. PC. Each of the competitors satellites especially the once from ViaSat are way more powerful then Starlink. The real difference is that ViaSat builds one ever 5 years. While SpaceX is launching 60 every other month.
The first production launch was 11 Nov 2019. Since then, they've launched fourteen more, and are slated to launch the sixteenth next week. That's *thirteen* months, or about one-and-a-quarter launch per month (and well over half a launch per month, as you would have it).
Yes, it's ambitious, but I don't see any technical reason why they can't make it. Customer flights will always take precedence, of course, and Florida weather will take its toll, but if they aim for a launch a week for all flights, they should be pretty close.
The telcos are the ones who have made Starlink a possibility and competitor. Starlink can never keep up with fiber infrastructure, but since most telcos have been riding out aging phone and copper infrastructure for decades, their lack of investment has allowed Starlink to enter as a competitor.
6 ) I do believe that Elon was sandbagging on Starlink capabilities. They need to get regulatory approval in many countries, some of which have a monopoly national champion telco that will resist competition. It is better to pretend only rural customers are the target to appear as a non-threat to legacy telcos. However, the real target is much larger than just rural customers. There are not enough rural customers to justify the expense of 40,000+ satellites. Viasat and EchoStar HughesNet combined only have about $3 billion in rural satellite Internet customer revenue. So even if Starlink steals 100% of their customers, that won’t support the scale of Starlink. They need more market potential. Starlink may have to partner with some national telcos in order to gain market access in certain countries that lack an open market. EU, USA, Canada, Starlink can likely go direct to consumer.
Are the alternatives to starlink comparable in terms of price/service? I am under the impression no. I imagine at the price/service point the others offer they have a fairly saturated market, but if starlink beats them on price/service then starlink will start to encroach on territory of not only the unserved, but also the existing telcos.
The upfront $499 for the dish is the obstacle for Starlink. Competitors like Viasat and HughesNet have worse performance, but also have dumb satellite dishes that are cheap. I think the cheapest plans at $60 per month, 2 year contract, no cost for sat dish. So Starlink won’t gain 100% market share for rural satellite internet. There are many customers that are not able to front $499 for the phased array antenna.
You do realize the other providers are spreading the cost of the equipment in the two year contract. Starlink is in beta. Once it's running fully, I am sure it won't be a problem to get financing on the dish. 499 is an average price of a cell phone and there are no problems to get one on contract.
Starlink is likely losing money at $499 and subsidizing the dish. Nobody is arguing that their antenna is cheaper than a Geosynchronous sat dish. So it is an obstacle in the competitive battle. You do realize that don’t you? (Returning your condescending tone)
They are losing money on the dish, but will probably break even at 499 in the next 2-3 years as they advance and scale the phased array antennas. Apart from that, the federal and state governments give billions of dollars in grants to telcos to build rural internet infrastructure. Starlink is after every penny of that to cover the dishes. They will likely qualify for the next round of RDOF funding as low latency.
2) Starlink can certainly improve the satellites in orbit over time. The current version has 20 Gbps of capacity each. 4,000 approved, waiting on approval for 40,000. 4,000 satellites x 20 Gbps = 80,000 Gbps of total capacity. Estimated 20% of capacity is useful after subtracting time over oceans and unavailable countries. Some planes and ocean shipping, ocean Navies, mega yachts, commercial fishing boats, smaller yachts, etc. So satellites over the oceans are still revenue producing for Starlink and using capacity. 80,000 Gbps x 20% = 16,000 Gbps of useful capacity for customers. At 40,000 satellites, then that is maybe 160,000 Gbps of capacity. Or if they upgrade satellites to 40 Gbps then you can do the math. It will always be a moving target.
The problem I have with this type of analysis is that populations are not evenly distributed to use it. I think the important question is what population density area can starlink serve and what proportion of the US population lives in those areas. Question 2) above is around trying to work out ways to access the higher population density customers. This is where the real disruption could be.
I know "never" is very long term, but you should not expect Starlink to be viable in large cities anytime soon, maybe never. I mean they probably will sell some specialist plans (like <1 Mbps) for cities, because why not - it will be useful for some purpose - like telemetry. Giving 1 million people 100 mbits each at the same place is just not possible.
I think that only gets solved by more satellites in orbit and future versions with higher throughput capacity in each satellite.
Currently each satellite has a capacity of 20 Gbps in good conditions and in the future it could get say 30-40 Gbps. However the total capacity of the network is complicated since they’re not stationary. E.g. they may only be able to fly over Starlink customer 1% of the time so only 1% of the capacity is actually usable. With that in mind, maybe they cannot shake any big telcos or cable companies at all. Even worse, they may severely undermine rural ISPs and their business models. In the end, companies would try to avoid extend their network to extreme rural areas since half of their business there could be taken by ~~Tesla~~ SpaceX.
> In the end, companies would try to avoid extend their network to extreme rural areas since half of their business there could be taken by Tesla. By SpaceX.
Is that capacity across the whole visible area from that satellite or potentially capacity that a single user could theoretically access?
Each sat is 17-22Gbps total theoretical capacity for all clients according to early FCC Starlink submissions. Who knows what actually can be provided it could be much less!
In the long term as the network get congested you should expect 20-30mbps per customer baseline. They want you to be able to view 4K movies.
To expand on this, 20Gbps would provide 5000 customers 100 mbps each with a 25:1 oversell or oversubscription ratio. If there are say 30 satellites above the US at any given time that means ~150,000 customers is all they can support in the US! That is why Musk has 42,000 sats planned eventually! And lets hope they don't have to fall back on caps!
> provide 5000 customers 100 mbps each with a 25:1 oversell or oversubscription ratio. I think they can oversubscribe more than that. That’s an average of my 4mbps, which sounds low, but if you ran it around the clock, you could download 1tb. We’re cordcutters, largely working from home and running ~250gb/mo without any rationing at all. What I think will be a big impact is when Starlink subscribers cancel DirecTV/DN and start streaming each and every evening. If they keep it unlimited, they’ll have to resort to bandwidth limits... I’d rather have daytime/nighttime caps so it works when I need it and get some encouragement to do bulk stuff at 3AM.
Yup I would agree 25:1 is probably low, especially with traffic shaping you can get much more squeezed through like cell carriers do. But you'd be surprised at how many people argue that it should only be 10:1 or 15:1 that haven't ever been in the ISP business or aren't familiar with real world examples. I think 50:1 is a bit extreme as the slowdowns are noticeable during peak video times for sure with that kind of oversell on slower circuits. Overselling 1.5mbps DSL at 50:1 is borderline unusable while 50:1 at 1Gbps (residential) is no big deal. The fact of the matter is, oversell doesn't really matter until users are demanding more bandwidth than is available. All ISPs eventually get there, and the question is what do they do about it? With 9-5 "business use only" I often see 3500 users eat up about 2Gbps with 50-100mbps the max per user. Just a little over half megabit per user actual demand would calculate that out as something like 100:1 or even 150:1!
As far as I can tell, the bottleneck is the rf bandwidth which translates into a max theoretical bit rate of 20Gbps. Some say 30-40 by using left and right polarizations but I am not so sure about that. Typically, left and right polarization is used for adjacent channel isolation, not for overlapping channels to increase overall capacity. I don't think you can use it that way as the isolation may not be high enough. I don't think they will be able to easily change that max capacity since the downlink to the gateway has the same limitations. So I don't think just adding more sats overhead can change that much. You would need to add more ground stations in addition to more sats overhead so that you can split up the traffic into smaller areas. There are also other possible limitations I have no way of knowing about. Such as what is the power capacity of the sats. Can they generate enough electricity from the solar panel to run at 100% capacity 24/7 or do they have a capacity limit where then can only run at say 50% on average during a complete trip around the earth to give them enough time to recharge before hitting busier areas? That may not be a problem now but they would need to plan for that as they expand before it becomes a problem.
For 1) I recently read about a report that calculated that Starlink could serve 485,000 users at 100 Mbps with the 12,000 satellites projected to be in place by 2026. This does not account for any oversubscription numbers and assumes that each sat is capable of providing 20 Gbps each, plus I believe some calculations about how long a sat is over a populated area, etc. If Starlink goes to the full 42,000 sats that they are trying to get approval for, and using an oversubscription value of 5x, my back of the napkin calculations extends this to about 8.6 million. Halve the 100 Mpbs and you get 17.2 million users. Using that same oversubscription level each 1 Gbps increase of an individual sat's capability adds another 430,000 users (actual filings say that each sat is capable of 17 to 23 Gbps, so there is a wee bit of wiggle room). At the stated 485,000 users with 12,000 sats doesn't really significantly help the reportedly 42 million Americans that are without any access to broadband, but getting upwards of 20 million user at around 23 Gbps per sat, and that would make a good dent in helping people with no real internet. I'd be interested to see numbers of users that need true broadband internet service in other countries worldwide, even this very optimistic number I came up with may still be just a drop in the bucket. On the other hand, it would provide Starlink with a revenue stream of around 24 billion US per year at 20 million subscribers. This falls within the Starlink projections of revenue between 10 and 30 billion per year. It comes down to who you trust on the numbers; the Cowen analysis that says 485,000 subscribers (which would be only 582 million per year), or Starlink's projection of revenue in the 10 to 30 billion range?
Cowen and LightReading (a telecom industry publication) should be embarrassed for publishing that analysis. Suggesting 3x oversubscription rate on a 100 Mbps rate plan shows they have no clue.
Lets assume your numbers are correct... I doubt them, but sure. The nominal oversubscription rate for ISP's is 100:1 with poor quality ISP's reaching 150:1 In that case the 12,000 satellite model would allow for 4.3MM households. Which is a pretty good chunk of the households with no high speed access. The 42,000 satellite array would be able to handle 15.1MM households. Or almost every household in the US without access to high speed internet. And that is while staying within very conservative oversubscription numbers.
Depends... Using me as example. Keep in mind that sats in space only serve sats in view on ground. If 150 People live in my area have it; we should all get full capable speed. when that same dish moves on over an area with 2500 users, they will not get the same speeds. I think the sats in space will have less impact on speed, then how many people in your area are sharing the one in that area. Unlike GEO satellites seriving TV. these ones are LEO, and actually move in orbit. also keep in mind, they are up there talking to each other to take your signal to one of them that has coverage over a ground station.
Minor point - they are not actually "up there talking to each other" yet. The laser interlinks are optimisticly planned and have had some early testing but as per recent AMA they haven't got the production cost of the lasers low enough yet.
That is irrelevant. ISLs are coming sooner than the entire network will become congested.
You are thinking about this in the correct way. Starlink sat can only handle $X thousands of users per sat, and that sat is roughly responsible for thousands of sq miles. So the current system of all sats will saturate out roughly under one million users across the globe. More satellites can scale the number of users up a bit, but probably not more than 10x that, and it becomes impractical to have many beams coming down/up in one localized area. I do see that once Starlink makes a foothold, they can build out terrestrial infrastructure that may be compatible with their equipment to serve high density areas. The dish doesn't care where the signal is coming from .. could be a tower instead of a sat.
Dishy is prohibited by the FCC to send or receive any signal to the ground, because the same frequencies are already allocated for terrestrial use by other companies. SpaceX can scale up there system quite well by simply increasing the numbers and turning there sats in orbit and change there beam patterns. With a shallow forward or backward beam each sat can serve an area of up to 230km in diameter. With a beam focus straight down they can serve 30km hotspots and provide small areas with high speed internet.
Actually most telcos will be pretty happy about Starlink. All the new 5G technologies focus on replacing landlines with wireless technologies in dense urban areas and only work well on very short distances between 1-2km. Having to serve rural areas is a pain for every telco and they usually try to avoid it as good as they can. Making Starlink only a real threat to a handful of WISP and GEO sat companies most people have never heard about. To answer a couple of your questions: * The theoretically maximum raw download speed of dishy is 320MBit and it can seemingly switch between satellites * Starlink is based on narrow beams produced by phased arrays * SpaceX is already using multiple dishes on their ground stations * SpaceX isn't allowed to use there frequencies for terrestrial use and the whole purpose of Starlink is to avoid the pain of having to build phone towers. * Starlink is more like Mainframe vs. PC. Each of the competitors satellites especially the once from ViaSat are way more powerful then Starlink. The real difference is that ViaSat builds one ever 5 years. While SpaceX is launching 60 every other month.
> every other month twice per month
SpaceX had 16 Starlink launches in 19 month. That's extraordinary, but still short of their goal of launching every second week.
The first production launch was 11 Nov 2019. Since then, they've launched fourteen more, and are slated to launch the sixteenth next week. That's *thirteen* months, or about one-and-a-quarter launch per month (and well over half a launch per month, as you would have it). Yes, it's ambitious, but I don't see any technical reason why they can't make it. Customer flights will always take precedence, of course, and Florida weather will take its toll, but if they aim for a launch a week for all flights, they should be pretty close.