Replies (19)
Amazon is going to have a similar service soon and then the legacy telecoms once they launch their own satellites
That would resolve much of my concern 🤙
Aren't the telecoms going to have to pay Bezos or Musk to launch them?
Yes, or until other rocket companies improve their reusable tech
Elon certainly gets credit for ambitious and “thinking big” but neither of these is the same thing as “economically viable.” Nor does that scale of ambition or vision mean that a big idea will be viable at some point in the future, or at all.
My issue with SPCX is that Internet and phone calls are things that have already been solved - they just feel shitty in the US being hamstrung by legacy regulation and infrastructure. Go to any major city in Asia or Africa and you’ll find a competitive market offering of blazing fast unlimited internet and cellular service for a few dollars a month.
There are places in the world where internet access is lacking but if we really care about human flourishing the issue in those places is more often access to power (and therefore refrigeration, clean/modern cooking technology, nocturnal lighting, etc), which SPCX does nothing to address (I do not consider this to a “fault” of SPCX, just a statement that challenges that assumption / narrative around product market fit)
Fundamentally I question the logic of hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to deliver satellite internet to places where either a) internet is already solved or b) the would-be rural customer base has far larger problems while also lacking the money of SpaceX kit. Especially when we already have a globally scale supply chain to deliver internet and cellular to places at very low cost. A technology being new, does not presuppose that it is actually better.
Also most, or really all, of Elon’s moon shoots have yet to pay off in terms of free market economic viability. Tesla is not a viable company without subsidies. SpaceX is not a viable company without subsidies. Humanoid robotics are simply not economically viable. What does the Boring Company even do and where is the hypertube, or whatever he’s calling it now?
Also, that Musk’s companies are not at the forefront of agitating for broad and rapid American nuclearization, is very telling to me. This is a fundamental base input all of his companies would benefit from massively and that is required for the logical extension of all of his “vision”but he’s happy to sell us all stories while sucking up our tax dollars.
And China IS nuclearizing so I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon is living in Beijing come 2035 once he’s conned America for all he can get.
That last bit about nuclear is super based. Great points made.
Is it still true that Tesla isn't viable without subsidies? I know it was that way for a long time, but I thought they had grown out of that.
Makes sense. The amount of power being accumulated by the US through starlink and stablecoins is mindboggling
I'm not commenting on this whole response, but I do want to say that internet is far from a solved problem in the US outside any major city. If you go more than 30 miles from the city the only internet options are cellular. Yes I'm fully aware we can blame regulation and corruption and collusion of billions of tax dollars and not even slaps on the wrist. But tech and corps move faster than voting and the state ever will.
Starlink is become the only affordable and usable options in suburban to rural US. People I know are paying hundreds of dollars per month for 8mbps peak with 300+ms ping. They can barely stream any modern media, poor voice calls, poor video streams etc.
I knew a guy who ran a fairly large non-profit maybe 6-7 years ago who's entire career was spent brining internet (in any form usable or unusable) to rural areas in the US. Specifically commercial and institutions, schools, libraries, medical, etc. They worked crazy hours just getting internet to a handful of locations on the east coast like the Carolina and Georgia. IIRC their biggest contracts were from Microsoft. I have no way of contacting him now, but Id be surprised if he didn't pivot to Starlink in totality now.
Well then, outside of regulatory shenanigans, this might suggest that it was not presently economically viable for existing telecoms to extend traditional Internet upgrades to certain low density rural areas in the US. And if that it is the case, then hundreds of billions of capex dollars poured into starlink satellite internet is likely NOT going to find a customer base to provide enough demand or margin to justify those capex investments, especially once government subsidies / tax-payed funded contracts dry up. Hence, SPCX is a capital destroying malinvestment machine.
Providing a solution to a problem that loses money doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real, it just means the solution isn’t likely to be around that long in the grand scheme of things.
Anyways, addressing the marginal cost of energy would be far more effect way to improve the economic is extending services to low density areas. It would be, quite objectively, one the best things we could do for the economy at large and for human flourishing in general.
For instance, we’ve had 18 years of Elon Tesla, it might be time to start judging the company by its performance rather than just the weight of Elon’s ambition. Also electric cars only make sense in areas of high density (which the US is largely bereft of), powered by a nuclearized grid, but whatever…
our network operators (o2, vodafone, t-mobile) share the infrastructure.
our summerhouse has access to one competely overloaded BTS and all 3 only tries to convince you that switching to their services will solve the problem.
doesn't matter how hard I tried to convince them that this is not a carrier issue, but infrastructure.
they all charge me like 600 czk/m for theoretically good enough performance which is however practically not achievable. So you buy a 1.5gb and get 100kbps to 2mbs. usually the lower bound.
switched to starlink for 1000 czk/m it's just no-brainer
Yeah for sure. It's just a practical option. And as far as starlink is concerned, you just pick up ALL of the rural locations, then it's worth it.
I am not sure if that is correct. Costs driven by the diseconomies of scale of a centralized provider trying to service ALL of a vast and low density area are immense to point that the business may not be viable. If this wasn’t the case, service delivery in the low density areas of Detroit would look a whole lot different, for instance, and those places still have a lot more density that the rural areas Starlink claims to be building its business around.
I'm not sure what you're saying. That starlink business is not sustainable?
The physics constrains the one-network scenario: spectrum limits Starlink to roughly 114 housing units per satellite cell, about one per square mile, if 100/20 Mbps is to hold. Serving phones runs through the same limited, shared spectrum.
Yes. This exactly. Starlink is not an economically sustainable business today without government largess. It might be in the future, but that feels highly questionable to me. That Starlink solves a problem for you (where you’re effectively paying a subsidized price), does not presuppose that there is actually a large enough organic market to sustain the business, without those subsidies.
I don't doubt that, nearly everything in tech is subsidized... but... lets not forget the incumbent options aren't good, they're deliberately bad despite billions of US tax dollars that were not spent on the infrastructure they were earmarked to spend on, and they have monopolies over these areas.
ANY reasonable alternative is better than the incumbent ones. I'd say that even for city areas now. Comcast, Cox, ATT, Verizon, none of them are _good_ options. And what I mean by good, is aggressive anti-consumer actions. Im willing to argue that few that have residential internet plans (that have had an internet plan for more than 2 years) are happy with their service. It's a common dinner table discussion to talk about how residential ISPs are butt fucking you.
I'm not here to argue the economics, but I will argue so long as it exists at the price, it's 100000000% better in nearly every way (so long as it works as advertised), if not the only option for any person that lives more than ~30 miles from their nearest _big_ city. That's a wide net and they've been killing it.
Also, (it's been quite a few years since I studied satellites so Im likely speaking on unknowns here) I'm suggesting the coverage of a satellite is a vast region. If you can make that work continuously (because everything moves in relative motion) which they have appeared to do, the entire globe can be your customer... That's all I'm suggesting, if you're able to pick up _every_ rural consumer and commercial business, then it's one less infrastructure cost for a region, one less constraint that requires work in urbanized areas nowadays.
> Starlink is become the only affordable and usable options in suburban to rural US. People I know are paying hundreds of dollars per month for 8mbps peak with 300+ms ping. They can barely stream any modern media, poor voice calls, poor video streams etc.
BTW This is in extraordinarily wealthy areas, if you take it to much poorer locations, their only infra exists within range of a single cell tower on a hill in the nearest town you're sharing with everyone who owns a cell phone. They just don't have it.
Yeah, I just want to be clear I'm not commenting on the sustainability of a company I've never taking the time to analyze, that's not my field. Im just here to argue that Starlink, in particular, is selling (and will continue to sell) like hot cakes over here. They can't get enough of it, and they appear to be delivering, which is rare. You gotta remember the incumbent ISPs are charging hundreds for claimed speeds of 10-20 time better than achieved because there is so lax regulation on it, and they're just so anti-consumer and openly corrupt.
It doesn't take much to sell us on it...
