The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8e75ed31-0c72-4160-b406-1ca6aa36a...
This is a pretty common pattern in capital intensive businesses. It's often the case that revenue is inline with operating costs, but revenue can't really ever pay for the start up costs. That dooms the initial business, but after bankruptcy it can be viable.
Depending on circumatances, the very visible bankruptcy also helps deter other businesses from joining the market. But if the cost was high due to technology, doing the same business 10-20 years later can work out because the start up costs may be significantly less.
They are completely unprofitable otherwise. Eventually even Starlink will lose money, as more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
Ecuador has the highest rate of cell phone ownership in the world, because they never built landlines and just went straight to wireless.
Same with electricity in many African countries -no grid, straight to local solar.
When I see comments like this it’s obvious you’re talking about West Virginia or Nevada as “rural regions around the world”
Go spend time in the Canadian arctic, the Congo, Sudan, Bolivia, Mongolia, Remote Australia and dozens and dozens more if you want to see where starlink shines and is rapidly changing the world.
The moment these people incorporate into a village, it becomes more profitable to build a fiber connection. Fiber will eventually get to Ecuador.
This is exactly what "the Internet" said about spacex when they announced Starlink. Oh, it never worked. LEO constellations were tried in the 90s, ALL of them failed. Haha, it will never work. 14k satellites, that's insane, dreams, lies, hahaha.
... and yet, they are now at ~10k satellites launched, and are serving 9+mil customers, for some unknown billions/year in revenue (should become clear in a few months when they IPO).
Read here on HN yday: they’ve $20B in revenue, but xAI is a drag.
Are we going to run out of space?
At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?
If you were to distribute 100,000 satellites across that shell, each one would have 2,600 square miles to itself. That's like having a single car in the entire state of Delaware. Mind you, that's if we are only considering a 2-D sphere, but space isn't 2-D you can space your orbits between 550 and 650 miles, with each 1 mile vertical increment acting as a "floor" or passing lane. You can now multiply your 265 million sq miles by 100x.
The issue isn't space, it's traffic management. Satellites zipping around at 17,000 MPH would make one hell of a debris field if even one pair of them collide. That's the Kessler Syndrome boogie man everyone is worried about.
Yes but don't forget that orbits decline and only satellites with onboard propulsion have the ability to boost them back up. Everything else like cubesats and random debris doesn't and thus doesn't "stay in their lane".
Sure, but satellites in a higher plane will need to navigate satellites below them during de-orbit. Conversely, satellites in a lower plane will likely need to avoid non-functional satellites that are uncontrolled as their orbit decays.
In a certain sense, we do. Pumping thousands satellites to LEO increases probability of triggering the Kessler syndrome. Luckily, LEO orbits are also self-cleaning on reasonable time scales (decades), so I think that some day we will trigger it (potentially, with some "help" from anti-satellite weapons) after which some kind of international regulation will be introduced to prevent repeating it in future.
The only thing that's actually scarce and that could be monopolized rather easily is frequency spectrum. In fact, I suspect this to be a frequency/operating license driven acquisition.
My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.
For wireless, the dynamics are very different (as long as spectrum isn't monopolized). As soon as you have enough satellites launched for global coverage, you can compete for all customers, and each one that switches away to the competition is more bandwidth available to you to undercut your competitor on pricing with.
Which boils down to "Use something incredibly expensive that we have very few of, instead of something that we have a number of that is comparatively cheaper. How dare you question the holy, sacred internet!"
During the Artemis launch it was very briefly mentioned that the launch window isn't a continuous window, but a series of windows interrupted for short times. I wondered if that was because of the thousands of satellites in orbit.
The anvil: satellites can't serve most people in a densely populated area, whereas terrestrial wireless can be engineered and deployed to serve any population density, even tens of thousands of people in a stadium.
The hammer: electronics get cheaper faster when they don't have to be space grade, and electronics get cheaper faster than rockets. As they get cheaper, terrestrial wireless will be deployed in more areas that are uneconomical right now.
And that is how the satellite TAM gets slammed.
That's if everyone is trying to connect to the satellite. Would it be possible to have regional hubs that connect and distribute the connection via a local wireless link like 5G?
Every kind of network has the potential for congestion, it's just easier and much cheaper to engineer a terrestrial network to avoid congestion. There are congestion scenarios for satellite networks that are not solvable.
But, once you start having multiple towers near by, you are going to link those up terrestrially (wireless or not) and pretty soon you'll end up with terrestrial backhaul.
Traditional ISPs already have a nice network of copper and fiber optic cables. I don't think satellites offer any advantage to most people here, except for those living in an area with slow wired connections.
Or possibly viasat.
For LEO data it seems that there will be plenty of competition. If you're talking about Amazon, they're in fiercely competitive markets. Them having the capital and cash flow ('size') to launch a competitor to SpazX is only a good thing.
When companies work together on things, like spectrum and constellations and handset deals it changes how people get billed.. It does not change the fact that people want to keep the messages small when millions of devices are using the same channel.
I am curious to see if people will still talk about having satellite access or if they will start talking about paying for what they use once this is up and running. D2D technology is still going to be used for these messages.
Starlink already has to constrain the number of broadband accounts per locale to avoid saturation.
This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.
For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.
And what's the effect on cancer rates, etc. from all that toxic pollution to both launch the satellites and then vaporize them in the atmosphere years later?
https://bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-p...
Sure would be nice if the answers to these questions were not guessing before we do the damage and impossible to fix after
Amazon acquires Apple's satellite partner
Interesting, I was expecting Apple to eventually buy them.
Still, makes sense to me: The aging Globalstar satellite constellation itself is probably not very interesting to Amazon, but their global L-band and S-band spectrum is, as are their existing licenses to operate a mobile satellite service in most countries.
It is impossible to overstate the success of the iPhone, but there are so many recent examples where they dipped their toes in only to fail or be left behind (autos, VR, AI, etc).
What will the next 20 years of Apple look like? Just more iPhones?
Charging a high fee to be a middleman is insanely profitable. People shouldn't be surprised that companies that get there don't do anything else.
I guess the stack should be completed with this. AWS servers, satellite communications, boxes to view content on TVs, apps on mobiles, content creation studios, advertising, product placement, product sales. Whew!
I guess they also want expertise to launch stuff into space, in case it becomes feasible to run space data centers.
Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos' private aerospace company
The randian matra of "Private = good, government = bad" always wins out
You end up with a private company run by the elite, not the people. One Dollar One Vote.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[1] https://www.land.com/property/201-acres-in-brown-county-nebr...
a 1m2 at 70C radiates 785 Watt. Seems thet cooling will be more simple than on Earth.
