That just means the high up front costs of either trenching fiber or launching satellites need to serve a lot of people to recover that cost. That means the last mile for rural residents tends not to be cost effective for fiber, because there aren’t enough connections served by any given segment.
But making it so any given satellite can serve lots of people in its footprint at any given moment might make it cost effective to serve rural residents.
One common strategy is to run fiber to a specific central location and run point to point microwave antennas to the individual houses/buildings served. That way the fiber itself can carry the traffic of hundreds of users, and each house just needs to have an antenna with line of sight to the place where the fiber is terminated. Rural WISPs have been doing this from before Starlink.
Yeah, but if they spread the cost across many customers, the cost per customer is going to be much smaller, even if it doesn’t last as long before needing a replacement.
If it costs $100,000 to build a fiber line to a single home for 30 years (360 months) that house will need to pay $278/month for 30 years to break even. Throw in interest rates/inflation, and it’ll be more.
But if a satellite that costs $1.5 million to build and launch into orbit can serve even 200 customers for 5 years, that’s only $125/month per customer.
As it stands right now, Starlink serves something like 12 million customers on 10,000 satellites. So that’s an average of 1200 customers served by each satellite, which is what makes $50/month service feasible as a business.
I think you’re missing the amortization of the r+d and capital upkeep of the whole launch complex. Since the satellites have such a short lifespan you can’t only count the upfront costs of manufacturing and launching, you have to include the whole shebang. The starlink system has to include the entire Falcon 9 architecture as overhead. And since it’s so integral to their ultimate business model you should also include all the development costs of starship to each starlink satellite. The ROE probably doesn’t look so good including all that, which explains Space Ai.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That just means the high up front costs of either trenching fiber or launching satellites need to serve a lot of people to recover that cost. That means the last mile for rural residents tends not to be cost effective for fiber, because there aren’t enough connections served by any given segment.
But making it so any given satellite can serve lots of people in its footprint at any given moment might make it cost effective to serve rural residents.
One common strategy is to run fiber to a specific central location and run point to point microwave antennas to the individual houses/buildings served. That way the fiber itself can carry the traffic of hundreds of users, and each house just needs to have an antenna with line of sight to the place where the fiber is terminated. Rural WISPs have been doing this from before Starlink.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You only dig fibre once. You need new starlink satellites every couple of years.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, but if they spread the cost across many customers, the cost per customer is going to be much smaller, even if it doesn’t last as long before needing a replacement.
If it costs $100,000 to build a fiber line to a single home for 30 years (360 months) that house will need to pay $278/month for 30 years to break even. Throw in interest rates/inflation, and it’ll be more.
But if a satellite that costs $1.5 million to build and launch into orbit can serve even 200 customers for 5 years, that’s only $125/month per customer.
As it stands right now, Starlink serves something like 12 million customers on 10,000 satellites. So that’s an average of 1200 customers served by each satellite, which is what makes $50/month service feasible as a business.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think you’re missing the amortization of the r+d and capital upkeep of the whole launch complex. Since the satellites have such a short lifespan you can’t only count the upfront costs of manufacturing and launching, you have to include the whole shebang. The starlink system has to include the entire Falcon 9 architecture as overhead. And since it’s so integral to their ultimate business model you should also include all the development costs of starship to each starlink satellite. The ROE probably doesn’t look so good including all that, which explains Space Ai.