Comment by expedition32
9 hours ago
Satellite internet is not a new invention- Iridium already did it and they went under. Nice for war zones and remote areas but not much else.
Besides the Chinese are launching their own network which will mean a price war. And the Chinese tend to win those.
Starling is an entirely different beast. However, it's addressable market is not unlimited. More people live in urban and suburban areas with fixed line internet than ever - the only real customer base is rural, and it still needs to compete with conventional mobile internet.
Starling is indeed very good, but it alone doesn't get spacex to 1.75T
Well, let’s not pretend like Starlink is the same as previous satellite internet providers. No previous providers were anywhere near as fast or low latency. The use cases for Starlink are a lot wider than previous solutions and it can even compete directly for customers who have cable existing service.
I still agree that the company is disastrously overvalued. Even if we consider Starlink to be just as valuable as a telecom like Verizon, that’s only a $190 billion dollar company.
Iridium cost $3/minute for voice or 2400bps data. Starlink prices and speeds are comparable to terrestrial broadband.