The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.
Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.
Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself.
And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.
Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.
But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?
Fucking scamer piece of shit. I watched the whole saga and to anybody with a brain it was clear he was a scammer. Anybody that even did minimal research into the industry it was clear what he was doing. He spent most of the money on adds for his stock.
To make him sound credibly he agree to really shitty deals (for him) with credible companies. So he could say 'we are in business with X'. Of course GM was the biggest fish they got in that regard, of course the GM CEO at the time was on crusade to claim they were doing 'EV' so I think even they knew it was mostly scam, but it got them into the media.
Zuck just goes 'all in' on every hype and blows billions, because he doesnt want to miss out on anything. What is a few 10s of billions here and there for a company with a money printer.
They have not gone heavely in on hydrogen based vehicles. They have talked about it a lot, and given some subsidies, but nothing so major as to make any impact at all.
Also, they invested in in hydrogen internal combustion engines just as much.
The reality is, and this is just a fact that all cars have recalls. And currently there are already lots of recalls that require software. Now you just have to go to the dealship.
At best you could argue, maybe the software is better because a bug is more expensive to fix. But that can also lead to low risk bugs not being fixed.
Either way, the solution is not to prevent update, but make the cost higher for companies if their software or their update causes anything safety critical to be wrong.
Regulation around having a separate update for security critical things might be reasonable on government level. But usually the update is not forced in if its mostly features.
Ah the old 'No true Scotsman' argument. Except of course that the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union were exactly what socialists before WW1 demanded. And what they tried to implement.
If the Soivet Union and friends were not Communist/Socialist then a communist economy simply doesn't exist, and has never existed and we see 0 reason why it would ever exists. And its not even clear what it would be or how it would work. So its completely and utterly irrelevant for any debate in the real world.
Its only in circular marxist self-mastrobation logic to redefine Soviet Union as 'monopolistic capitalism'.
> The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade
Not in terms of actual performance ...
Maybe for Graphics cards, but at the same time, those graphics cards can do things now they could not before so they gained in value.
Anything other then capitalism with slightly more regulation is just going from the US to Germany. Great, but they have software updates on cars too.
If you want to change anything more fundamental, you are going to have to do a planned economy.
At best you can say, maybe could be slightly better Germany by having a better political process or something. But even then, software updates in your car are going to be a reality because it solves are problem for manufactures, saves consumers lots of time in many cases and generally the positives outway the negatives.
I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
At best we can argue for some better practice about OTA Updates in regards to security and functionality. Maybe forcing manufactures to have a 'security only' feed an a 'feature feed'.
> I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.
More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.
And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.
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