> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
The rural market, RV market, boating market will always be an enormous niche. But fiber and other broadband tech like 5g wireless may win out in the long or mid term. Leaving only the very secluded rural market.
I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
> In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.
There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
Is the population outside areas that could reasonably be served by mobile connections really a billion? A few hundred people around should already be enough for a single tower.
Well even if you only get 10 million customers you break even in overnight costs on your 60k $1m satellites after 6k each. If starship ever materialises, and after making 20k or so satellites they should get cheaper too.
Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.
Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.
Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.
I doubt that actually. I've got Starlink because I despise Comcast. They're my only wired option, even though I live in a largish city. I realize it's possible I'm an outlier, but on the other hand a lot of other people really hate Comcast too. I even had fiber at my old house and really liked it, but it's just not an option where I currently live, and I'd rather use satellite internet than pay for more fiber to be laid.
The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.
It never really made sense to me. But then again I live in country that can do mobile infra. 4G and 5G with good availability and affordable or even cheap prices. And we are not even dense.
So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.
Perhaps you dont realize just how not-dense some of the western US is. Looking through counties in Nevada, some of them have less than 1 person per 10 square km.
Rural Eastern Washington has rotting 1Mbps DSL, line-of-sight towers on a few mountains (good luck seeing them), and overloaded 4G internet. And there are thousands and thousands of people here! Fiber-everywhere futurists are seeming more disconnected than Starlink fanboys.
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"