SpaceX can't scale regionally, they have to scale globally. The nature of their satellites is that if they want to accommodate 2x as many users in a city they have to double their capacity.
The push I'm discussing is the cost to get a baseline internet out there for 10k people per 100 miles.
I'm assuming the cost per last mile is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. If that's true right now the majority of our population is in cities so SpaceX will have trouble reaching them.
That's the core of my point. For Starlink to hit everyone in a city they'd have a huge amount of wasted capacity in rural areas.
Satellites also degrade naturally over time. They have a set lifetime and don't all last that long. Cables under the ground tend to last longer even if they require spot fixes. I'm assuming that bandwidth wise, the cables are more efficient at least until getting manufactured equipment to space becomes even more cheaper.
Yeah but we're talking about a company that has in their near-term plans the capability to _launch 4 rockets per day_.
They're completely capable of adding capacity like that and having a high satellite count.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have a cost, but they have no middleman. They don't need to buy space on somebody else's rocket. They also don't have to pay any ongoing maintenance cost beyond equipment replacement and it's much cheaper than doing it on land. I know that you have satellite experience but their launch costs are a fraction of what other companies have done till now.
I worked for a suburban, regional ILEC and our operating costs were around 100 million a year to cover like two counties of maybe 100k customers and the local businesses.
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I actually do agree with you about costs delivering in dense markets as providing locally has certain "economy of scale" benefits. It's also not going to compete on the "Gigabit in every home" front, because I do agree that the bandwidth is more limited. Operating a local provider in general though is extremely expensive and doesn't really provide any additional benefit to the provider. SpaceX themselves have uses for this network. I also hope that I'm right here :)
The bandwidth here is 100K per state not 2 counties. That's my issue with your calculations, we're probably somewhere in the middle. They might stop servicing people outside of town. I'd probably use the metric, if you're on septic you're probably better served by SpaceX than Comcast. If you're on sewer then Comcast will probably be better (no not always, I'm no sith).
We'll have to agree to disagree. Honestly, I hope you're correct and I'm wrong. I think ground based infrastructure is still going to be much cheaper at medium to high population densities. You don't agree with me, but I learned a lot in this back and forth. Thanks.
Their target launch cadence has been missed by quite a bit for many years. At this point they are only launching their own satellites at a cost to them, and not launching very many paying customer payloads at all.
The push I'm discussing is the cost to get a baseline internet out there for 10k people per 100 miles.
I'm assuming the cost per last mile is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. If that's true right now the majority of our population is in cities so SpaceX will have trouble reaching them.
That's the core of my point. For Starlink to hit everyone in a city they'd have a huge amount of wasted capacity in rural areas.
Satellites also degrade naturally over time. They have a set lifetime and don't all last that long. Cables under the ground tend to last longer even if they require spot fixes. I'm assuming that bandwidth wise, the cables are more efficient at least until getting manufactured equipment to space becomes even more cheaper.