Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 million subscribers.
For the U.S. alone, that'll probably never happen. But worldwide? Maybe. Though worldwide the price per subscribe will be less, often times substantially less.
On the other hand, SpaceX will have lots of operational discounts because its their own rockets, and they already have all the supply channels for building space tech. And maybe they aren't looking to payback in 10 years for this initial run; maybe they only want to break even so payback in 15 is good enough.
Just some numbers for thought.
P.S. Businesses unlucky enough to be in "rural" areas, aka most commercial business parks outside of tech cities, are in the unfortunate position of paying the local telephone company/AT&T/TimeWarner thousands per month for roughly dial-up speeds. SpaceX could charge the same but offer broadband speeds and get a nice chunk of business, methinks.
This isn't a very useful comparison. For one, according to their FCC application SpaceX is planning on launching satellites with a mass of less than 400kg. For comparison, SES-10, a communications satellite SpaceX launched recently, had a mass of around 5300kg. Secondly, they're planning on deploying them to an altitude of 1000km. Again, for comparison, SES-10 went to geostationary orbit, which is a reasonably common communications satellite orbit, at 36000km altitude, though the Falcon 9 only had to push it into GTO, which still takes quite a lot of energy.
Finally, the plan is obviously contingent on bringing launch costs further down and realising economies of scale in the satellite manufacture. I'm not sure if they can do it, but being able to launch at least 10, and maybe even as many as 20 at once makes a large difference.
I doubt that the per/satellite cost would be anywhere close to $80-100 million. I remember hearing that the plan was for these satellites to have significantly less mass than other satellites and therefore, one orbital launch could deliver many satellites. With these satellites orbiting ~30-34x closer to Earth, the satellites would need to have significantly less mass if they were going to not have their orbital distance not degrade too quickly. I don't know what the expected lifespan of these satellites will be, but I assume they will eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
Saying their mass needs to be lower to reduce orbit degradation is the opposite of true. Assuming two spheres of equal size, their drag and thus change in momentum will be the same at the same altitude. But if one sphere was made of lead and the other made of styrofoam, the styrofoam one will decelerate much faster than the lead one. So: lighter satellite of the same shape means shorter life span. But drag dies down roughly exponentially in altitude, so if they're at 1000 km, rather than 100km, that's not a super big factor.
According to (https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la...) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443.
Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 million subscribers.
For the U.S. alone, that'll probably never happen. But worldwide? Maybe. Though worldwide the price per subscribe will be less, often times substantially less.
On the other hand, SpaceX will have lots of operational discounts because its their own rockets, and they already have all the supply channels for building space tech. And maybe they aren't looking to payback in 10 years for this initial run; maybe they only want to break even so payback in 15 is good enough.
Just some numbers for thought.
P.S. Businesses unlucky enough to be in "rural" areas, aka most commercial business parks outside of tech cities, are in the unfortunate position of paying the local telephone company/AT&T/TimeWarner thousands per month for roughly dial-up speeds. SpaceX could charge the same but offer broadband speeds and get a nice chunk of business, methinks.