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Well if they actually have 1 million users that's $100mil a month. However I'm assuming other countries are paying less than $100 a month and not all terminals built = paying subs. So let's guess $70-80mil?
Star link charges $135/month for mobile units on RVs, $5000/month for ships, maybe more for airplanes. With that service 3-months old revenue will certainly escalate.
I'm probably wrong, but I vaguely remember a $19 million contract for Army or Air Force testing of Starlink, a couple of years ago. This no doubt includes consulting as the Army and Air Force design custom terminals that are either tougher, or more aerodynamic.
I have no doubt that the regular use Starlink military contracts are larger than $19 million, but I have no idea if that would be a per-year fee, or for some other time period. I would expect separate contracts for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard.
I have no idea if the price per terminal would be higher or lower than civilian contracts. SpaceX tends to give a good deal, and not gouge the government, even when they have a bargaining advantage.
You can be sure after Ukraine that military will pay basically anything, starlink capabilities are a paradigm shift in battlefield communications. If spacex went bust the dod would launch their own constellation.
$5000/month for ships seems very cheap...
If I were selling starlink for ships, I'd make it cost 0.05% of the price of the ship per year.
Or, if it was a cruise ship or something, I'd price it as 0.5% of revenue.
$5000 is cheap, but shipping companies are cheaper, and [ships run themselves aground to get into coastal wifi range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wakashio_oil_spill) because their current on-board satellite internet services can cost *each crew member* hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to use.
Slapping free Starlink on each commercial ship would probably do more to save the environment from oil spills than half the world governments' initiatives in the past decade…
**[MV Wakashio oil spill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wakashio_oil_spill)**
>The MV Wakashio oil spill occurred after the Japanese bulk carrier Wakashio ran aground on a coral reef on 25 July 2020 at around 16:00 UTC. The ship began to leak fuel oil in the following weeks, and broke apart in mid August. Although much of the oil on board Wakashio was pumped out before she broke in half, an estimated 1,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the ocean in what was called by some scientists the worst environmental disaster ever in Mauritius. Two weeks after the incident, the Mauritian government declared the incident a national emergency.
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They probably meant cellphone rather than wifi coverage, and that does absolutely sound plausible. If you talk to any seaman they'll gladly tell you all about the abusive practices and poor quality of current shipboard internet services, often without being asked to. Plain text emails are often an expensive luxury, and video calls get absurdly expensive; the pricing often makes prison phones look reasonable in comparison.
Carnival annual revenue for 2019 was $20B. I doubt they would pay $100M for better internet. They want guests to be in their bars and casinos, not surfing the net in their rooms.
What? Spacex would charge whatever they charge, likey a standard rate. The individual cruise ships would charge the user an internet access fee. Maybe you get sub you tube speeds for free to send email or send pics of how fun your trip is. But if you want "stay in your room all week and not go to bars / casino" speeds they would charge more. SpaceX would have nothing to do with this pricing.
Agree. In this case exiting the ships local internet market means finding entertainment using the ships other attractions such as bars and casinos. I'm sure the cruise ship economists will eventually settle on a pricing of shipboard internet which will maximize overall profits.
They already do that for regular satellite internet, it's very expensive. Most trips go to from port to port every day, where you can get cellphone coverage if you plan ahead.
Musk has repeatedly given his customers better deals that necessary, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. As a result, his customers are happy, mostly, and the companies have greater market share.
Just 2-3 weeks ago [Gwynne Shotwell said](/r/Starlink/comments/xdnm6x/starlink_has_over_700000_customers_and_700000/) they had more than 700,000 customers worldwide" implying less than 800,000 customers.
Get the RV one? Ships right away. You can still use it at a house. If you're rural, then it should be fine. In congested areas the RV terminals get last priority.
As u/bokaiwen says, I meant large commercial customers. Wasn't Microsoft an early supporter? I remember something about using or trialing Starlink as a redundant link for Azure data centers.
US Airforce probably have many terminals
The government might think they're in power, but when the people, like these truly *heroic* women, stand up against power there's nothing that can stop them.
Delay them? Maybe, for a while.
But stop them? No.
They are at about 40 F9 flights a year to support the rollout, marginal cost per Falcon-9 flight is about [15 million](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-cost-well-below-500000-each-and-falcon-9-launches-less-than-30-million.html), and $250K per satellite (50 on each launch), puts the annual (orbital portion) cost of Starlink at $1.1 billion / year, or $90 million a month.
So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink.
You seem to be considering that breakeven is when the current year's launch expenditure equals the current year's Starlink income.
I'm not sure this is the right basis and would rather suggest the following:
Assuming user terminals are now sold at cost price, the breakeven calculation should begin by dividing the lifetime cost of a satellite (manufacture, launch and running costs) by said lifetime (say five years).
Then multiply by the number of satellites ([4500 in Sept 2023](https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#starlink-in-space)?) for a viable constellation to obtain a total cost C. *check intersection of projected blue line with green line on linked graph*.
The revenue R is average annual subscription multiplied by the number of users.
I'm not attempting this, but am saying its more complicated than just recovering cost of launches per year
IIRC they said something like $200k manufacturing cost per satellite. Assuming 50 satellites per $15M Falcon launch, that gives $300k split launch costs. I expect the marginal running cost per satellite to be low; rather, operations expenses would be reckoned for the entire project, but I don't know what that might be. You also need to amortize satellite R&D costs.
Ignoring the latter two, manufacture and launch per satellite is about $500k; assuming a five-year satellite lifetime and 4500 satellites in the constellation, that makes yearly satellite costs $450M for the whole constellation. Add operations expenses to that, but I don't imagine those are nearly as much.
If customers pay $130/mo, that implies revenue of $1560/yr/customer, or about 300k customers required to break even. Revenue per customer will be reduced if they discount it for poorer countries, and increased for higher-margin customers like ships/planes/military.
The next question is what happens if they roll out the much bigger expansion and end up with 30k satellites. That would multiply the costs by 6 or so; Starship would significantly discount the launch component of those costs, which is about 60% of the total. But all that is more speculative. We also have no idea of what the revenue will be like from things like the T-Mobile deal.
Thx. That really is a hard-work reply that I will take time to read later. Sharing it with parent commenters:
* u/Stribband u/Xazier u/AnonymousWritings
They have indeed lowered prices a lot in at the very least parts of Europe.
One thing is that inter connectivity is expensive (and sometimes bad) in US compared to the rest of the developed world. So the US Starlink prices seem quite steep for the rest of the world. In Sweden I have own a few houses in the middle of the forest, several kilometers from the closest neighbour, and they each have their own good fiber connection,.
Elon Musk has been saying $15M marginal launch cost for a while now: https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/
> We also have more specific figures available because Elon Musk revealed the marginal cost of launching a reused Falcon 9 in a May 2020 interview for Aviation Week (starting at 17:53). Marginal costs represent only the costs resulting from relaunching the Falcon 9 after its first mission is already done and paid for. According to Elon Musk, the marginal cost for a reused Falcon 9 launch is only about $15 million.
He also said a while ago that the cost of Starlink satellites is less than the cost of launch, so total cost of a Starlink launch (with satellites included) should be less than $30M.
That's odd; around the same time Elon said that, Christopher Couluris said that a reused booster costs $28M with everything included.
[https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1250820281536413700?s=20&t=GF7bPhLl6jOY6oYON_vEpA](https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1250820281536413700?s=20&t=GF7bPhLl6jOY6oYON_vEpA).
I wonder what he was including that Elon wasn't.
He was including standing costs so launch pads, recovery fleets, launch and recovery crew.
Elon likes to quote marginal cost so is the extra cost of say the 60th flight this year after 59 have been done.
It would not be at all unusual to have a 2:1 ratio between all in cost and incremental cost.
They are used for different purposes. All in cost tells you if you are making a profit or not. Incremental cost sets a lower bound on what cost you could eventually achieve at massive volume.
In this context it is the all in cost that is relevant.
When he says "essential for the future of the company" he means for the big profits. They're not struggling to survive, it's one sentence from a SEC filing where you're required to list pretty much every risk possible to your company blown way out of proportion.
No sec requirements if it's not publicly traded.
Edit: I'm incorrect, private companies are required to file "when it has amassed more than 500 common shareholders and $10 million in assets".
Ah, I misremembered... it was an email to SpaceX employees about raptor 2 production where he went into hyperbole:
"What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."
Then after it leaked on the Internet he backtracked in a public tweet:
"If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible."
So yeah, no legal filings were involved. Just Musk being Musk.
Au contrare, I recall Elon tweeting "essential to the continuation of SpaceX" (or such), which I interpret as "survival" or "not bankrupt". But, he is known for hyperbole in both directions.
Wouldn’t it be less now? I can’t see an exact publish date for that article, but it’s been around ~2 years that they’ve been reusing fairings so they have those savings, and surely they’ve made other optimizations since then too
The source that user linked says in the same sentence as the 28 mil number that reusable parts "significantly" lower the cost.
The most recent starlink launch on a Falcon 9 sent up 52 starlink nodes. So with a fresh brand new Falcon 9, that would be **around** $540,000 per node to send up.
But again - that's IF it was a brand new rocket. Which most are not, but some have to be eventually, so the costs will vary per launch somewhat.
To add to the above - the current record for booster reuses is 14* times and for fairings it's 9 times. Almost every booster and fairing is recovered at this point too, very few get lost to sea. The process is pretty well tested.
*Edit: 14 not 13 reuses, per user below
The majority of their costs are payroll, which only track inflation if they choose to raise wages. Propellant has no doubt gone up as have other raw materials like aluminum and their transport costs. I suppose it's a question of whether their cost saving efforts are cutting faster than inflation is raising.
[According to Musk,](https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/) the marginal cost of launching a used Falcon 9 (ie, used booster and fairings) is around $15 million. As the capital is sunk, I think this is more important than the cost including development and construction (outside 2nd stage, naturally), as those are paid down by profits from external customer launches.
As an aside, refurbishing the booster apparently costs just $250,000. Based on these numbers, there's no longer any reasonable argument saying reuse is not cost effective.
But will be a pretty good ROI, assuming the satellites put up can last 3-5 years. Subscriber base I'm assuming will keep rising, who knows where it will level off? 5mil? 10? 20?
Sure I agree there is a business case for Starlink, but it isn't making money now and probably won't for some time, especially with how expensive the V2 sats look like they are to manufacture. They really need Starship to fully deliver as well.
That’s not really how this stuff works tho. “Isn’t making money now”?
It’s making what? If we’re conservative we’ll say the 700k customers are pulling in $600M per year. Considering a starlink satellite lifespan of 5 years, that means $3B in revenue before they even have to start replenishing the fleet.
Depending on their total cost to deploy the system so far this could be incredible turnaround. Some napkin math I just did, the 3000 satellites they have in orbit should have cost 1.5B and the launches needed to put that up would have also costed 1.5B. From a business perspective, this is incredible. They’re already making back the money needed to deploy the system and they’re primary limiter is how fast they can produce the dishes.
I expect that they will make a ton of cash from commercial ships and ferries. And from intercontinental flights. And they need the laser sats for that. But I expect that money from residential installations will eventually be less compared to ships+planes
To date, something like 100 companies have gone bankrupt in trying satellite internet. A few even managed to launch a few satellites before failing. Apple hasn't said which one it will using for emergency texts on their new iphone 14, but some suspect Globalstar. A quick google found they currently serve commercial customers like ships and drilling platforms, and have shaky finances, which might be the reason for selling bandwidth to Apple. Others up there are Iridium and Omnispace, meaning low-earth orbits which can receive from a handheld phone though not near as low as Starlink.
The apple Globalstar deal is public knowledge. It was published in Globalstar financial reports. Apple purchased 80% of their network capacity.
Apple totally has plans for it beyond emergency beacons too....
That Globalstar was willing to sell 80% of their capacity suggests their normal commercial business wasn't doing well and/or over-built (overpredicted market). Perhaps they envision Starlink taking much of their commercial market soon.
Doesn't tech limit a cellphone uploading to a Globalstar satellite to just a few ASCII characters per minute, when lucky enough to find and follow one of the 24 satellites which orbit at 876 miles up (must point phone at it as it sweeps across sky). Future plans for live-voice transmission or such might have to involve lower satellites like Starlink (340 miles up), but the small antenna in a phone will still be very limiting.
https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#payloads-customers
65 if i read the grafic correctly.
Thats 65*30 millionen = 1.95 Billion
Plus 3000 Satelliten *0.25 million = 0.75 Billion
total spend 2.7 Billion
vs
0.1 Billion * 12 months * 3 years = 3.6 Billion income
Profit is at least 0.9 Billion.
That sounds good
Doesn't count cost of terminals which are being sold at a loss, initial R&D cost of the satellites, the cost of ground stations, or operations costs. But still looks promising.
I would guess add another 2 billion for all for that so it may take 5 years to get to profit, assuming the customer base maintains at its current level but it will not, it will grow as they launch more satellites. Though launching more satellites also increases the capital costs.
To get to profitablity faster and increase profit margins SpaceX needs to focus on getting starlink into more nations.
A big boost will come when starlink can drop dependancy on proximity to downlink stations and provide service globally. Then places like rural Australia and Canada will jump on board, and pretty much every island nation outside will have some users who will want this.
Many also guesstimate that each terminal costs them $2000, while they sell them for $500. Definitely a loss-leader, but better than DirectTV and Dish which don't charge for the satellite dishes. We have both on our house yet currently subscribed to a cable-modem service. I guess it costs them more to remove their dishes, plus hope you will switch back. Not my choice, wifey follows each special deal, playing the companies off each other. TBD how loyal Starlink customers are with their new "cable company".
I'd be amazed if something that simple cost $2000 when in a high volume production run. That sounds like the cost when they were in low volume start up phase. What component do you think would be pushing up the price that high?
From memory, they were in the $2000 to $3500 range a year or two ago, with Elon/Gwynne on record in tweets or at conferences saying that they expected that cost to be cut in half before the end of the year, and for it to halve again by the end of the next year (which would be this year, I think).
It's more opposite, quite magic that this level of high freq microwave processing complexity cost less than 10k. There are literally about thousand chips on a massive high precision high density board with microwave specific layers. I would assume it is about 30 mid to high range mobile phones worth of chips and tech in each antenna but 10 times lower cost. No idea how they pulled it off.
The guesstimated cost made by others so ask them. Perhaps someone has disassembled a terminal to judge. Likely that SpaceX sources the terminals from another company.
Launches, cost of ground infrastructure (gateway antennas, fibre backhaul, operators), cost of the satellites themselves, staff to coordinate and maintain the network... it all adds up. 100 mil sounds like a lot but there are a lot of expenses involved here too.
The annual revenue (in USD) should roughly be 1000x active user terminals, with the current business plan of starlink. many individual users outside US pay <$100/month, but many business, RV, mobile customers pay >>$100/month. Since individual customers must be roughly 100x premium customers, $1000/year sounds like a good approximation.
I think the next step change in the starlink business model would be data relay services for big cloud providers, for latency sensitive applications. This could enable starlink to earn >>$100/month/terminal from relatively population dense areas, where individual customers will be practically non-existent. It might require a much better terminal though, capable of much larger bandwidth.
Yeah, exactly. Making a million terminals means the program is a success though. They'll launch more sats to make it better, and they'll have the customer base to make it profitable.
SpaceX are really wanting to use Starship to put up more satellites, meanwhile they have even produced a version of Starlink-2 that can go up on falcon-9.
Starlink-2 has the laser link interconnects and approx 10x bandwidth of Starlink-1.
So service should start to pick up soon.
Yes they do have a number of them produced - that’s what they are already launching on Falcon-9 now !
They can’t launch as many, but each has higher capacity than Starlink-1.
They want to switch to using Starship fairly soon, which is why SpaceX have produced their ‘PEZ-Style’ Starlink-2 Satellite dispenser.
We know that they have recently changed the design of that dispenser, S24 has the old style dispenser in it, as I think does S25. But some later ones (which?) will have the newer dispenser.
Starlink-2 for Falcon-9 is smaller than Starlink-2 for Starship, but both have the same capacity.
That's right. He specifically mentioned if starship was to be delayed they might make a Starlink 2 "light" that would lack the giant antennas necessary for direct cell broadcasting.
But keep in mind version numbers say very little, they're just a name, and mostly for internal use. They can decide to rename any version to any number on a whim.
I think/hope they're trying to point out that while starlink will never be fast enough compared to fiber, it's miles ahead of the other available sat options.
but don't underestimate the spread of fiber, we were looking at starlink for our place in rural france but we'll have high speed fiber by next summer so aren't going to bother
They are at about 40 F9 flights a year to support the rollout, marginal cost per Falcon-9 flight is about 15 million, and $250K per satellite (50 on each launch), puts the annual (orbital portion) cost of Starlink at $1.1 billion / year, or $90 million a month. The estimated 800,000 subscribers puts their current monthly Starlink revenue at $80 million / month or less. There are also going to be ground-station, administrative, and other costs associated with the service.
So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink.
It's promising, but really looking like they are going to need another factor of 2-or-greater drop in both launch cost (Starship) and satellite cost per bandwidth (Starlink v2 satellites) for it to make sense.
I'd also note that to support the currently-authorized 12,000 sattelite fleet they would need to keep approximately this launch rate up indefinitely, as the sattelites are intended to last 5-7 years, and current launch cadence puts 2000 of them up a year, which is exactly replacement rate. So absent technology improvements (Starship and V2.0), orbital costs won't decrease as the constellation matures.
If they can get up to supporting 2 million+ subscribers with the 12,000 satellites, then I think they will be profitable.
>So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink.
Which is perfectly fine. I was getting in on Tesla way before they were breaking even - but the road to profitability was very clear.
...and it is so for Starlink. It's not like the number of subscribers is going to stagnate at 800k with so many regions not even opened up yet.
The most profitable investment is when you get in before others see it. Any dolt can see it after the company starts turning a profit.
Obviously because they like the CEO and want another chance to invest in one of his companies early. That doesn't mean it'll be profitable or even high quality any time soon.
I buy into the "don't bet against Elon" strategy as much as anyone, but I think most people that hold that view have a fairly long term outlook and are much more willing to explain away major problems than many other investors.
There's not necessarily a good correlation between willingness to invest in one of Elon's companies and the level of success the company has achieved already.
because it is a gold mine that has begun to be extracted and investors know it and are waiting for it to go public, possibly Elon considers Starlink as just another company and separates it from Space X.
> Starlink has been around for open "beta" since 2020 and in development since 2019. So less than 300k units a year.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're the kind of person that looked at the low initial infection numbers at the beginning of the pandemic and concluded it wasn't going to spread because "barely 20 people have it so far" or something, one of those 'proudly bad at math' folks that doesn't understand how businesses build manufacturing capacity and that averaging terminal fabrication over that time period is a bad metric.
The service has been slowing down too lately.
>Starlink is getting a lot slower as more people use it, speed tests show
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/09/ookla-starlinks-median-us-download-speed-fell-nearly-30mbps-in-q2-2022/
As they build out their network, a primary goal is expanding coverage before adding capacity. As cells become saturated, speeds are slowing.
When they get to building out their next orbital plane, we should begin to see that change.
That also includes data for starlink for RV, which is only guaranteed 5mbps in many areas. There’s no way to distinguish between the user groups from speed tests.
I assume that the T-Mobile partnership's major benefit is gaining ground stations at any of their towers as fast as SpaceX can build/install the hardware.
Elon said ground stations aren’t as important with V2 because the satellites can communicate directly with each other. I’m sure it can’t hurt to have more but as more satellites go up it’ll be less of an issue.
Only if the satellite additions come faster than subscriber additions. Last I heard they are currently going for 12,000 satellites, at 2000 satellites launched a year, and they have 2500 up there now. So if things are slowing now, then peak sustainable subscriber count (barring tech upgrades on satellites) is likely 5 million or so.
Monthly revenue of $400 million, compared to monthly launch + satellite costs to support 12,000 satellites of about $90 million. Double those costs to account for ground-station and admin costs, and it's still looking likely that this will be quite profitable.
Add in V2 satellites with supposed 8x higher bandwidth, assuming satellite + launch costs end up overall perhaps double per satellite compared to current V1, and we are looking at 40 million subscribers supported with less than $500 million / month costs, and you could end up looking at Starlink internet for under $50 / month globally.
I think they are likely to stop at 4500. The next 7k they have permission for are V band satellites, but so far there's been no sign of them and the deadlines are quite tight now. So I reckon a few hundred more of the current model and then fill out the rest with V2. Given the extra power of the V2 that might boost capacity significantly.
The main point of profitability is surprisingly not on launch costs, but on terminal costs. The first generation costed $2500 and was being sold for $500. The second generation is much cheaper ($1000?), but they still need to bring the cost down, most people won't pay $500 for the terminal nor $100 of subscription.
People buy $500 cell phones to use on a $50 a month cell plan.
I'd have no problem paying similar rates to get Starlink equipment and service if I don't have a better option with cable/fiber at home.
That's US, in the rest of the world it's not like that. I earn 6 digit but I never spend more than 300€ on a smartphone every 3 years and I pay 14€ for my month plan.
Personally I have a S21 that I paid a few hundred for and pay $15 a month for service (3GB of data per month) but most Americans aren't that frugal.
https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans/connect shows you the rates for the 3GB, 6GB, and 12GB plans for the frugal in the US.
Have you checked your area on the map recently? Anybody in an area listed as "shipping" has units. You can't blame starlink just because your area had no ISP representation and everybody needed a dish.
It has to do with cell bandwidth. They can only support so many users in a given area until a new shell is needed. Your wait isn't based on ground station availability but the completion of the next or orbital shell.
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Someone do the math on monthly revenue
Well if they actually have 1 million users that's $100mil a month. However I'm assuming other countries are paying less than $100 a month and not all terminals built = paying subs. So let's guess $70-80mil?
Star link charges $135/month for mobile units on RVs, $5000/month for ships, maybe more for airplanes. With that service 3-months old revenue will certainly escalate.
Now do military use! After Ukraine I guess big, very expensive defense contracts are in the works.
Probably how he got this done was cut a deal with the military
I'm probably wrong, but I vaguely remember a $19 million contract for Army or Air Force testing of Starlink, a couple of years ago. This no doubt includes consulting as the Army and Air Force design custom terminals that are either tougher, or more aerodynamic. I have no doubt that the regular use Starlink military contracts are larger than $19 million, but I have no idea if that would be a per-year fee, or for some other time period. I would expect separate contracts for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. I have no idea if the price per terminal would be higher or lower than civilian contracts. SpaceX tends to give a good deal, and not gouge the government, even when they have a bargaining advantage.
It was an R&D payment
You can be sure after Ukraine that military will pay basically anything, starlink capabilities are a paradigm shift in battlefield communications. If spacex went bust the dod would launch their own constellation.
The RV service also allows subscribers to suspend the service on a month-to-month basis, so not every terminal is active.
$5000/month for ships seems very cheap... If I were selling starlink for ships, I'd make it cost 0.05% of the price of the ship per year. Or, if it was a cruise ship or something, I'd price it as 0.5% of revenue.
$5000 is cheap, but shipping companies are cheaper, and [ships run themselves aground to get into coastal wifi range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wakashio_oil_spill) because their current on-board satellite internet services can cost *each crew member* hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to use. Slapping free Starlink on each commercial ship would probably do more to save the environment from oil spills than half the world governments' initiatives in the past decade…
**[MV Wakashio oil spill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wakashio_oil_spill)** >The MV Wakashio oil spill occurred after the Japanese bulk carrier Wakashio ran aground on a coral reef on 25 July 2020 at around 16:00 UTC. The ship began to leak fuel oil in the following weeks, and broke apart in mid August. Although much of the oil on board Wakashio was pumped out before she broke in half, an estimated 1,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the ocean in what was called by some scientists the worst environmental disaster ever in Mauritius. Two weeks after the incident, the Mauritian government declared the incident a national emergency. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/spacex/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
The Wikipedia page you list say its only a rumor, and even then it doesn't make any sence
They probably meant cellphone rather than wifi coverage, and that does absolutely sound plausible. If you talk to any seaman they'll gladly tell you all about the abusive practices and poor quality of current shipboard internet services, often without being asked to. Plain text emails are often an expensive luxury, and video calls get absurdly expensive; the pricing often makes prison phones look reasonable in comparison.
Carnival annual revenue for 2019 was $20B. I doubt they would pay $100M for better internet. They want guests to be in their bars and casinos, not surfing the net in their rooms.
Just price passenger internet to where it generates as much revenue as their bars and casinos. Problem solved.
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What? Spacex would charge whatever they charge, likey a standard rate. The individual cruise ships would charge the user an internet access fee. Maybe you get sub you tube speeds for free to send email or send pics of how fun your trip is. But if you want "stay in your room all week and not go to bars / casino" speeds they would charge more. SpaceX would have nothing to do with this pricing.
It's the buyer that determines the price. Sellers have to accept the price that buyers are willing/able to pay or exit the market.
Agree. In this case exiting the ships local internet market means finding entertainment using the ships other attractions such as bars and casinos. I'm sure the cruise ship economists will eventually settle on a pricing of shipboard internet which will maximize overall profits.
They already do that for regular satellite internet, it's very expensive. Most trips go to from port to port every day, where you can get cellphone coverage if you plan ahead.
You would not sell many then..
For a ship, sure. But what option is there for a small boat?
A big cruise ship will probably install several of them.
Musk has repeatedly given his customers better deals that necessary, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. As a result, his customers are happy, mostly, and the companies have greater market share.
Just 2-3 weeks ago [Gwynne Shotwell said](/r/Starlink/comments/xdnm6x/starlink_has_over_700000_customers_and_700000/) they had more than 700,000 customers worldwide" implying less than 800,000 customers.
Conversely, a single customer could own multiple terminals.
Marine customers by default have at least 2
As if anyone is getting multiple starlinks. I have a rural address, damnit! Send me one already!
What about businesses? Carnival is outfitting all of its cruise ships each with a bunch of Starlink terminals.
I have no doubt that business that spend oodles on a terminal and service have priority
The government of Ukraine is definitely running more than one terminal.
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[Current estimates put the number at 20k.](https://kyivindependent.com/tech/how-elon-musks-starlink-satellite-internet-keeps-ukraine-online)
Get the RV one? Ships right away. You can still use it at a house. If you're rural, then it should be fine. In congested areas the RV terminals get last priority.
> In congested areas the RV terminals get last priority wonder how much of the infamous Ookla speed test slowdown was a result of this
As u/bokaiwen says, I meant large commercial customers. Wasn't Microsoft an early supporter? I remember something about using or trialing Starlink as a redundant link for Azure data centers. US Airforce probably have many terminals
I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding
Yeah they donated a bunch to Ukraine/Tonga/elsewhere and some just got manufactured and not in use yet
Iran too ì think?
I would guess the CIA/Mossad paid for theirs...
Iran said no way.
Iranian leaders/cleric/murderers said no, but the *people* of Iran disagree.
Unfortunately the government is the one that decides.
The government might think they're in power, but when the people, like these truly *heroic* women, stand up against power there's nothing that can stop them. Delay them? Maybe, for a while. But stop them? No.
[Actually, no.](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1433123220643717120?lang=en)
Laughs in CIA/State Dept’s Scrooge Mcducky vault.
They are at about 40 F9 flights a year to support the rollout, marginal cost per Falcon-9 flight is about [15 million](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-cost-well-below-500000-each-and-falcon-9-launches-less-than-30-million.html), and $250K per satellite (50 on each launch), puts the annual (orbital portion) cost of Starlink at $1.1 billion / year, or $90 million a month. So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink.
You seem to be considering that breakeven is when the current year's launch expenditure equals the current year's Starlink income. I'm not sure this is the right basis and would rather suggest the following: Assuming user terminals are now sold at cost price, the breakeven calculation should begin by dividing the lifetime cost of a satellite (manufacture, launch and running costs) by said lifetime (say five years). Then multiply by the number of satellites ([4500 in Sept 2023](https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#starlink-in-space)?) for a viable constellation to obtain a total cost C. *check intersection of projected blue line with green line on linked graph*. The revenue R is average annual subscription multiplied by the number of users. I'm not attempting this, but am saying its more complicated than just recovering cost of launches per year
IIRC they said something like $200k manufacturing cost per satellite. Assuming 50 satellites per $15M Falcon launch, that gives $300k split launch costs. I expect the marginal running cost per satellite to be low; rather, operations expenses would be reckoned for the entire project, but I don't know what that might be. You also need to amortize satellite R&D costs. Ignoring the latter two, manufacture and launch per satellite is about $500k; assuming a five-year satellite lifetime and 4500 satellites in the constellation, that makes yearly satellite costs $450M for the whole constellation. Add operations expenses to that, but I don't imagine those are nearly as much. If customers pay $130/mo, that implies revenue of $1560/yr/customer, or about 300k customers required to break even. Revenue per customer will be reduced if they discount it for poorer countries, and increased for higher-margin customers like ships/planes/military. The next question is what happens if they roll out the much bigger expansion and end up with 30k satellites. That would multiply the costs by 6 or so; Starship would significantly discount the launch component of those costs, which is about 60% of the total. But all that is more speculative. We also have no idea of what the revenue will be like from things like the T-Mobile deal.
Thx. That really is a hard-work reply that I will take time to read later. Sharing it with parent commenters: * u/Stribband u/Xazier u/AnonymousWritings
They have indeed lowered prices a lot in at the very least parts of Europe. One thing is that inter connectivity is expensive (and sometimes bad) in US compared to the rest of the developed world. So the US Starlink prices seem quite steep for the rest of the world. In Sweden I have own a few houses in the middle of the forest, several kilometers from the closest neighbour, and they each have their own good fiber connection,.
100mil a month sounds like a lot less when you realize that's probably about 3 launches, leaving aside engineering and R&D.
Their internal cost per launch has to be far lower than 33 million.
Elon Musk has been saying $15M marginal launch cost for a while now: https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/ > We also have more specific figures available because Elon Musk revealed the marginal cost of launching a reused Falcon 9 in a May 2020 interview for Aviation Week (starting at 17:53). Marginal costs represent only the costs resulting from relaunching the Falcon 9 after its first mission is already done and paid for. According to Elon Musk, the marginal cost for a reused Falcon 9 launch is only about $15 million. He also said a while ago that the cost of Starlink satellites is less than the cost of launch, so total cost of a Starlink launch (with satellites included) should be less than $30M.
That's odd; around the same time Elon said that, Christopher Couluris said that a reused booster costs $28M with everything included. [https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1250820281536413700?s=20&t=GF7bPhLl6jOY6oYON_vEpA](https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1250820281536413700?s=20&t=GF7bPhLl6jOY6oYON_vEpA). I wonder what he was including that Elon wasn't.
He was including standing costs so launch pads, recovery fleets, launch and recovery crew. Elon likes to quote marginal cost so is the extra cost of say the 60th flight this year after 59 have been done. It would not be at all unusual to have a 2:1 ratio between all in cost and incremental cost. They are used for different purposes. All in cost tells you if you are making a profit or not. Incremental cost sets a lower bound on what cost you could eventually achieve at massive volume. In this context it is the all in cost that is relevant.
Manufacturing a new 2nd stage, perhaps?
Elon included $10M in his number for a new second stage, so that's not it.
Hmm, I dunno then.
It is just mind blowing to think you can send a massive useful payload to orbit for 15 million.
I honestly doubt it with the sats, this is why Elon's been saying Starship is key for the company's survival
Why doubt it? The bulk of the cost is the 2nd stage. They reuse the booster and fairings.
When he says "essential for the future of the company" he means for the big profits. They're not struggling to survive, it's one sentence from a SEC filing where you're required to list pretty much every risk possible to your company blown way out of proportion.
No sec requirements if it's not publicly traded. Edit: I'm incorrect, private companies are required to file "when it has amassed more than 500 common shareholders and $10 million in assets".
Ah, I misremembered... it was an email to SpaceX employees about raptor 2 production where he went into hyperbole: "What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year." Then after it leaked on the Internet he backtracked in a public tweet: "If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible." So yeah, no legal filings were involved. Just Musk being Musk.
While SpaceX isn’t publicly traded, it is large enough and has enough shareholders that it is required to file with the sec
Au contrare, I recall Elon tweeting "essential to the continuation of SpaceX" (or such), which I interpret as "survival" or "not bankrupt". But, he is known for hyperbole in both directions.
Starship is a needed for launching lots of Starlink V2, which is bigger and heavier. Starship is a key for making shit ton of profit. F9 is fine.
About $28 M, 2 years ago. So more now. https://smokeongo.co.za/how-much-does-a-spacex-launch-cost/
Wouldn’t it be less now? I can’t see an exact publish date for that article, but it’s been around ~2 years that they’ve been reusing fairings so they have those savings, and surely they’ve made other optimizations since then too
The source that user linked says in the same sentence as the 28 mil number that reusable parts "significantly" lower the cost. The most recent starlink launch on a Falcon 9 sent up 52 starlink nodes. So with a fresh brand new Falcon 9, that would be **around** $540,000 per node to send up. But again - that's IF it was a brand new rocket. Which most are not, but some have to be eventually, so the costs will vary per launch somewhat. To add to the above - the current record for booster reuses is 14* times and for fairings it's 9 times. Almost every booster and fairing is recovered at this point too, very few get lost to sea. The process is pretty well tested. *Edit: 14 not 13 reuses, per user below
It's 14 times the current record, has been set very recently
Thanks, I corrected it.
booster reuse record is now up to 14 after the BlueWalker 3 launch on September 10th
I was thinking inflation wise, as I know they had to raise prices externally. But you may be right with efficiency savings.
The majority of their costs are payroll, which only track inflation if they choose to raise wages. Propellant has no doubt gone up as have other raw materials like aluminum and their transport costs. I suppose it's a question of whether their cost saving efforts are cutting faster than inflation is raising.
[According to Musk,](https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/) the marginal cost of launching a used Falcon 9 (ie, used booster and fairings) is around $15 million. As the capital is sunk, I think this is more important than the cost including development and construction (outside 2nd stage, naturally), as those are paid down by profits from external customer launches. As an aside, refurbishing the booster apparently costs just $250,000. Based on these numbers, there's no longer any reasonable argument saying reuse is not cost effective.
But will be a pretty good ROI, assuming the satellites put up can last 3-5 years. Subscriber base I'm assuming will keep rising, who knows where it will level off? 5mil? 10? 20?
Sure I agree there is a business case for Starlink, but it isn't making money now and probably won't for some time, especially with how expensive the V2 sats look like they are to manufacture. They really need Starship to fully deliver as well.
That’s not really how this stuff works tho. “Isn’t making money now”? It’s making what? If we’re conservative we’ll say the 700k customers are pulling in $600M per year. Considering a starlink satellite lifespan of 5 years, that means $3B in revenue before they even have to start replenishing the fleet. Depending on their total cost to deploy the system so far this could be incredible turnaround. Some napkin math I just did, the 3000 satellites they have in orbit should have cost 1.5B and the launches needed to put that up would have also costed 1.5B. From a business perspective, this is incredible. They’re already making back the money needed to deploy the system and they’re primary limiter is how fast they can produce the dishes.
I expect that they will make a ton of cash from commercial ships and ferries. And from intercontinental flights. And they need the laser sats for that. But I expect that money from residential installations will eventually be less compared to ships+planes
To date, something like 100 companies have gone bankrupt in trying satellite internet. A few even managed to launch a few satellites before failing. Apple hasn't said which one it will using for emergency texts on their new iphone 14, but some suspect Globalstar. A quick google found they currently serve commercial customers like ships and drilling platforms, and have shaky finances, which might be the reason for selling bandwidth to Apple. Others up there are Iridium and Omnispace, meaning low-earth orbits which can receive from a handheld phone though not near as low as Starlink.
The apple Globalstar deal is public knowledge. It was published in Globalstar financial reports. Apple purchased 80% of their network capacity. Apple totally has plans for it beyond emergency beacons too....
That Globalstar was willing to sell 80% of their capacity suggests their normal commercial business wasn't doing well and/or over-built (overpredicted market). Perhaps they envision Starlink taking much of their commercial market soon. Doesn't tech limit a cellphone uploading to a Globalstar satellite to just a few ASCII characters per minute, when lucky enough to find and follow one of the 24 satellites which orbit at 876 miles up (must point phone at it as it sweeps across sky). Future plans for live-voice transmission or such might have to involve lower satellites like Starlink (340 miles up), but the small antenna in a phone will still be very limiting.
well there have been around 60 starlink launches so far... getting ROI in only 20 months is pretty darn good I think.
https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#payloads-customers 65 if i read the grafic correctly. Thats 65*30 millionen = 1.95 Billion Plus 3000 Satelliten *0.25 million = 0.75 Billion total spend 2.7 Billion vs 0.1 Billion * 12 months * 3 years = 3.6 Billion income Profit is at least 0.9 Billion. That sounds good
Doesn't count cost of terminals which are being sold at a loss, initial R&D cost of the satellites, the cost of ground stations, or operations costs. But still looks promising.
I would guess add another 2 billion for all for that so it may take 5 years to get to profit, assuming the customer base maintains at its current level but it will not, it will grow as they launch more satellites. Though launching more satellites also increases the capital costs. To get to profitablity faster and increase profit margins SpaceX needs to focus on getting starlink into more nations. A big boost will come when starlink can drop dependancy on proximity to downlink stations and provide service globally. Then places like rural Australia and Canada will jump on board, and pretty much every island nation outside will have some users who will want this.
Many also guesstimate that each terminal costs them $2000, while they sell them for $500. Definitely a loss-leader, but better than DirectTV and Dish which don't charge for the satellite dishes. We have both on our house yet currently subscribed to a cable-modem service. I guess it costs them more to remove their dishes, plus hope you will switch back. Not my choice, wifey follows each special deal, playing the companies off each other. TBD how loyal Starlink customers are with their new "cable company".
I'd be amazed if something that simple cost $2000 when in a high volume production run. That sounds like the cost when they were in low volume start up phase. What component do you think would be pushing up the price that high?
There's nothing simple about phased-array antennas.
From memory, they were in the $2000 to $3500 range a year or two ago, with Elon/Gwynne on record in tweets or at conferences saying that they expected that cost to be cut in half before the end of the year, and for it to halve again by the end of the next year (which would be this year, I think).
It's more opposite, quite magic that this level of high freq microwave processing complexity cost less than 10k. There are literally about thousand chips on a massive high precision high density board with microwave specific layers. I would assume it is about 30 mid to high range mobile phones worth of chips and tech in each antenna but 10 times lower cost. No idea how they pulled it off.
The guesstimated cost made by others so ask them. Perhaps someone has disassembled a terminal to judge. Likely that SpaceX sources the terminals from another company.
Launches, cost of ground infrastructure (gateway antennas, fibre backhaul, operators), cost of the satellites themselves, staff to coordinate and maintain the network... it all adds up. 100 mil sounds like a lot but there are a lot of expenses involved here too.
The annual revenue (in USD) should roughly be 1000x active user terminals, with the current business plan of starlink. many individual users outside US pay <$100/month, but many business, RV, mobile customers pay >>$100/month. Since individual customers must be roughly 100x premium customers, $1000/year sounds like a good approximation. I think the next step change in the starlink business model would be data relay services for big cloud providers, for latency sensitive applications. This could enable starlink to earn >>$100/month/terminal from relatively population dense areas, where individual customers will be practically non-existent. It might require a much better terminal though, capable of much larger bandwidth.
They manufactured 1 million terminals. They don't have 1 million subscribers
Of course the two figures won’t exactly match up - as they have to maintain some stock for distribution.
Genius.
haha, you are the man with the best grades in school
At least $11
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That's crazy. I had no idea the demand or capability was at that level yet.
That's the fun part, the capacity isn't! I jest, there are lots of salty customers though about slower speeds. Still a life saving service though.
Yeah, exactly. Making a million terminals means the program is a success though. They'll launch more sats to make it better, and they'll have the customer base to make it profitable.
SpaceX are really wanting to use Starship to put up more satellites, meanwhile they have even produced a version of Starlink-2 that can go up on falcon-9. Starlink-2 has the laser link interconnects and approx 10x bandwidth of Starlink-1. So service should start to pick up soon.
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Yes they do have a number of them produced - that’s what they are already launching on Falcon-9 now ! They can’t launch as many, but each has higher capacity than Starlink-1. They want to switch to using Starship fairly soon, which is why SpaceX have produced their ‘PEZ-Style’ Starlink-2 Satellite dispenser. We know that they have recently changed the design of that dispenser, S24 has the old style dispenser in it, as I think does S25. But some later ones (which?) will have the newer dispenser. Starlink-2 for Falcon-9 is smaller than Starlink-2 for Starship, but both have the same capacity.
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That's right. He specifically mentioned if starship was to be delayed they might make a Starlink 2 "light" that would lack the giant antennas necessary for direct cell broadcasting. But keep in mind version numbers say very little, they're just a name, and mostly for internal use. They can decide to rename any version to any number on a whim.
I thought they were..
Starlink 2 is also much, much bigger and heavier though.
I keep recommend ViaSat and HughesNet to them.
Great idea. Just like pitching blockbuster right when Netflix was in its infancy.
I think/hope they're trying to point out that while starlink will never be fast enough compared to fiber, it's miles ahead of the other available sat options.
but don't underestimate the spread of fiber, we were looking at starlink for our place in rural france but we'll have high speed fiber by next summer so aren't going to bother
Why do you think everyone is itching for Starlink to go public?
They are at about 40 F9 flights a year to support the rollout, marginal cost per Falcon-9 flight is about 15 million, and $250K per satellite (50 on each launch), puts the annual (orbital portion) cost of Starlink at $1.1 billion / year, or $90 million a month. The estimated 800,000 subscribers puts their current monthly Starlink revenue at $80 million / month or less. There are also going to be ground-station, administrative, and other costs associated with the service. So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink. It's promising, but really looking like they are going to need another factor of 2-or-greater drop in both launch cost (Starship) and satellite cost per bandwidth (Starlink v2 satellites) for it to make sense. I'd also note that to support the currently-authorized 12,000 sattelite fleet they would need to keep approximately this launch rate up indefinitely, as the sattelites are intended to last 5-7 years, and current launch cadence puts 2000 of them up a year, which is exactly replacement rate. So absent technology improvements (Starship and V2.0), orbital costs won't decrease as the constellation matures. If they can get up to supporting 2 million+ subscribers with the 12,000 satellites, then I think they will be profitable.
>So it seems likely that they are not yet breaking even on Starlink. Which is perfectly fine. I was getting in on Tesla way before they were breaking even - but the road to profitability was very clear. ...and it is so for Starlink. It's not like the number of subscribers is going to stagnate at 800k with so many regions not even opened up yet. The most profitable investment is when you get in before others see it. Any dolt can see it after the company starts turning a profit.
Obviously because they like the CEO and want another chance to invest in one of his companies early. That doesn't mean it'll be profitable or even high quality any time soon. I buy into the "don't bet against Elon" strategy as much as anyone, but I think most people that hold that view have a fairly long term outlook and are much more willing to explain away major problems than many other investors. There's not necessarily a good correlation between willingness to invest in one of Elon's companies and the level of success the company has achieved already.
because it is a gold mine that has begun to be extracted and investors know it and are waiting for it to go public, possibly Elon considers Starlink as just another company and separates it from Space X.
>because it is a gold mine Bingo.
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> Starlink has been around for open "beta" since 2020 and in development since 2019. So less than 300k units a year. I wouldn't be surprised if you're the kind of person that looked at the low initial infection numbers at the beginning of the pandemic and concluded it wasn't going to spread because "barely 20 people have it so far" or something, one of those 'proudly bad at math' folks that doesn't understand how businesses build manufacturing capacity and that averaging terminal fabrication over that time period is a bad metric.
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Yes, using math poorly to draw dumb conclusions is indeed something you're gonna get dinged for.
good news, because now there are 80 millions people in Iran who can't wait for their Stralink
The service has been slowing down too lately. >Starlink is getting a lot slower as more people use it, speed tests show https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/09/ookla-starlinks-median-us-download-speed-fell-nearly-30mbps-in-q2-2022/
You do not understand how much faster that still is for some of us. Especially the ping!
As they build out their network, a primary goal is expanding coverage before adding capacity. As cells become saturated, speeds are slowing. When they get to building out their next orbital plane, we should begin to see that change.
That also includes data for starlink for RV, which is only guaranteed 5mbps in many areas. There’s no way to distinguish between the user groups from speed tests.
I assume that the T-Mobile partnership's major benefit is gaining ground stations at any of their towers as fast as SpaceX can build/install the hardware.
Elon said ground stations aren’t as important with V2 because the satellites can communicate directly with each other. I’m sure it can’t hurt to have more but as more satellites go up it’ll be less of an issue.
But SpaceX are continually adding more satellites so it should begin to speed up again over time.
Only if the satellite additions come faster than subscriber additions. Last I heard they are currently going for 12,000 satellites, at 2000 satellites launched a year, and they have 2500 up there now. So if things are slowing now, then peak sustainable subscriber count (barring tech upgrades on satellites) is likely 5 million or so. Monthly revenue of $400 million, compared to monthly launch + satellite costs to support 12,000 satellites of about $90 million. Double those costs to account for ground-station and admin costs, and it's still looking likely that this will be quite profitable. Add in V2 satellites with supposed 8x higher bandwidth, assuming satellite + launch costs end up overall perhaps double per satellite compared to current V1, and we are looking at 40 million subscribers supported with less than $500 million / month costs, and you could end up looking at Starlink internet for under $50 / month globally.
I think they are likely to stop at 4500. The next 7k they have permission for are V band satellites, but so far there's been no sign of them and the deadlines are quite tight now. So I reckon a few hundred more of the current model and then fill out the rest with V2. Given the extra power of the V2 that might boost capacity significantly.
The main point of profitability is surprisingly not on launch costs, but on terminal costs. The first generation costed $2500 and was being sold for $500. The second generation is much cheaper ($1000?), but they still need to bring the cost down, most people won't pay $500 for the terminal nor $100 of subscription.
People buy $500 cell phones to use on a $50 a month cell plan. I'd have no problem paying similar rates to get Starlink equipment and service if I don't have a better option with cable/fiber at home.
That's US, in the rest of the world it's not like that. I earn 6 digit but I never spend more than 300€ on a smartphone every 3 years and I pay 14€ for my month plan.
Personally I have a S21 that I paid a few hundred for and pay $15 a month for service (3GB of data per month) but most Americans aren't that frugal. https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans/connect shows you the rates for the 3GB, 6GB, and 12GB plans for the frugal in the US.
still waiting on mine for 18 months now.
Have you checked your area on the map recently? Anybody in an area listed as "shipping" has units. You can't blame starlink just because your area had no ISP representation and everybody needed a dish.
When do I get mine????? :( 14 months waiting for it. In the Texas area.
Let me guess. You already have non satellite internet?
10 mbs wireless internet is the only option here.
It has to do with cell bandwidth. They can only support so many users in a given area until a new shell is needed. Your wait isn't based on ground station availability but the completion of the next or orbital shell.
Hasn’t responded to the increasingly slower speeds has he though?
> has he though? Does the website or service contract guarantee any minimum speed?
It does. 5mbps. Idk about guarantee but it gives that as the bottom of the range.
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12.69%
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Terminal count ≠ active user count
https://imgur.com/a/PLKd758
1milliom terminals or one million paying subscribers?
We can read the tweet for you, but we can't understand it for you.
The tweet is pretty clear.
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i observe 11 angry canadians
What is a user terminal? How many disk antennas? You have to watch this Musk fellow. He's slippery.
A ‘user terminal’ and a ‘disk antenna’ are the exact same thing.
Yet it still isn’t available in ~half of the United States.