Starlink : General Discussion - Thread 2

[Robotbeat]

The 140,000 number is from November 2021, I believe. They’re likely approaching 200,000 now.

I agree 500,000 by end 2024 is a pretty safe assumption. Could easily get there by the end of this year if they can launch at a similar or better rate as last year and terminal deployment overcomes component shortage issues.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

The 140,000 number is from November 2021, I believe. They’re likely approaching 200,000 now.

I agree 500,000 by end 2024 is a pretty safe assumption. Could easily get there by the end of this year if they can launch at a similar or better rate as last year and terminal deployment overcomes component shortage issues.

As I was trying to point out demand is there but the terminal build rate is not. Considering how long it looks like the terminal plant in Texas will take to get to full level of production. Which my current estimate in this supply chain environment is likely to be sometime in 2023.

On a separate note here is what the revenue 2022 at the subscriber level and increase rate should be ~$300M and ~$500M in 2023. But 2024 estimate is still a wide range of from $700M to $2,000M. Almost all of it dependent on the terminal build rate not the satellite deployment rate. Unless Starship has significant problems and delays Gen 2 cost of per sat manufacture and launch should end up in just 2 years to be less per sat than the current V1.5 sat. Where sat manufacture cost increases but launch cost / sat significantly decreases. Since launch cost /sat is greter than the manufacture cost / sat then the result for Gen 2 is a lower deployment cost (sat manufacture + launch) will end being less than current.

[freddo411]

Tim Farrar is at it again: Starlink's reach won’t be enough to solve rural broadband dilemma — Farrar

Because there is only a finite amount of spectrum available to LEO broadband systems such as Starlink (which must be shared with other LEO systems within the U.S., according to FCC rules), only a limited amount of capacity can be delivered to users in a given area, regardless of the number of Starlink satellites in the sky.

It is therefore far from clear that Starlink will be capable of serving a comparable number of customers to Viasat and Hughes (i.e. in excess of 500K subscribers), let alone a significant proportion of the millions of homes in the U.S. that currently lack terrestrial broadband, in the medium term.

Overall, while Starlink represents an admirable first attempt to develop a LEO broadband system and bring more choices to rural U.S. consumers, it cannot and will not become the only option for satellite broadband in the U.S. or around the world, because in many areas at least some potential customers will be unable to access Starlink, due to capacity limitations and/or the difficulty of securing a reliable line-of-sight to the constellation.

I'd very much like to bet against this prediction.   

Home based rural users will continue to grow around the world, greatly exceeding one million user terminals.    For various reasons, not everyone is a good fit for a starlink connection ... to which I say, so what?   Millions of dispersed rural customers represent billions of dollars of revenue per year.   This is currently, and will continue to cannibalize viasat and Hughes customers en mass.

Starlink will have lucrative deals with the Military, airlines and shipping companies .. all of which are excellent customers with wide open skies and the need for high bandwidth, low latency.   This will add on to the home based customers.

[DanClemmensen]

Tim Farrar is at it again: Starlink's reach won’t be enough to solve rural broadband dilemma — Farrar

Because there is only a finite amount of spectrum available to LEO broadband systems such as Starlink (which must be shared with other LEO systems within the U.S., according to FCC rules), only a limited amount of capacity can be delivered to users in a given area, regardless of the number of Starlink satellites in the sky.

It is therefore far from clear that Starlink will be capable of serving a comparable number of customers to Viasat and Hughes (i.e. in excess of 500K subscribers), let alone a significant proportion of the millions of homes in the U.S. that currently lack terrestrial broadband, in the medium term.

Overall, while Starlink represents an admirable first attempt to develop a LEO broadband system and bring more choices to rural U.S. consumers, it cannot and will not become the only option for satellite broadband in the U.S. or around the world, because in many areas at least some potential customers will be unable to access Starlink, due to capacity limitations and/or the difficulty of securing a reliable line-of-sight to the constellation.

Starlink will have less than 500K subscribers? We'll see...

It will be interesting to see what kind of response he will have if Starlink gets anywhere close to their long term goal of 10gb connections to its users.

"Finite amount of spectrum" is very nearly meaningless, due to spectral reuse. When transmitters are in different locations and the receivers use sufficiently narrow beams, the same frequencies can be reused. Simple example: GEO satellites are at 2-degree longitude separation. Two GEO satellites in adjacent slots can use the same frequencies. The receiver chooses a satellite to use by pointing at it. Same thing happens with the LEO constellations, but it's more complicated because the satellites move with respect to the receivers. At the limit, the number of satellites that can transmit to one spot on the earth depends on how well the receiver can discriminate (how tightly the receiver can focus on the satellite) which is a function of the receiver's antenna size. The GEO arc is fairly full, but we are nowhere near saturating LEO. The earliest LEO constellations concentrated on making sure each spot on the Earth's surface could see at least one satellite, but the laws of physics would let a spot on Earth discriminate more than 100 satellites. As a practical matter there is a huge amount of complexity involved if you try to reach this level, but it's feasible.

"line of sight" is another non-problem, given enough satellites. With a minimum constellation designed only to guarantee one satellite in view, then yes, a subscriber needs to see the whole sky. But with lots more satellites, a given user will have at least one satellite visible even if the whole sky is not visible. On average the users will end up seeing the whole sky, so it all works out.

Please note: this is a theoretical analysis. I do not know how it relates to today's Starlink constellation.

Spectrum reuse is limited by the allowable power flux at the Earth's surface.

Yes, making the receiver bigger helps. So does making it more efficient. But the biggest opportunity IMO is to make the spot beam tighter, by a combination of lower satellites and larger satellite-side transmitter antennas. This keeps the power flux constant, but means that the area that was formerly served by 1 beam is now served by 2, or 3 or more... each of which can reuse the same spectrum and thus serve 2x, or 3x, or more users.

The V-band VLEO constellation is already using smaller cell sizes than the Ka/Ku band constellation. So with the same efficiencies to can serve more customers per hertz of spectrum used.

I was assuming the use of smaller spots already.

I was unaware of a regulatory limit on the aggregate power: I thought it was a limit per-transmitter. Seems a bit silly given the radio flux from the Sun.

Higher frequencies allow smaller antennas with the same directivity, so V-band antennas are smaller. At the extreme, use lasers. But higher frequencies suffer much more from rain, clouds and other atmospheric effects. C-band gets through easily, while Ku, Ka, V, ...,infrared, visible, ....) suffer progressively more. But the effects are fairly local, so a theoretical fully integrated system could use the lower frequencies for customers whose higher frequencies are degraded. (back to the days of the old 4-foot diameter C-band dish, though.)

[envy887]

While it would be true if you were talking all rural broadband, I actually disagree because he mentions *satellite* broadband. Starlink has more satellites in orbit than all other such services combined, so Starlink has better line of site than all others combined. Capacity limitations have a similar argument, although literally today that might be true it’s extremely unlikely in the medium term.

Tim F has lost credibility, from claiming firm sources that ended up undercounting the number of satellites per launch before Starlink v0.9, to claiming SpaceX had entirely abandoned the idea of laser links to claiming they couldn’t use the dense stack of cards deployment method with lasers… I’m not sure why anyone considers him credible any more.

SpaceX has over 140,000 subscribers. It won’t take very long for them to reach 500,000. I predict by end of 2024.

He said Starlink won't be the only option for sat broadband worldwide. Which is almost certainly true, but not very meaningful. Some countries will prefer domestic competitors, and may refuse to license Starlink or emplace onerous requirements for that reason. The GEO companies serving direct to consumer internet are also probably going to stick around, but their revenues are going to take a big hit.

The 500k is a US-only figure. The claim that they can't reach that in the US is silly. It's probably technically possible for Starlink to service that many US customers with only the 1800 sats in orbit today, while still keeping the 95% percentile speed above 50 Mbps, if they could get the dish components they need.

Higher frequencies allow smaller antennas with the same directivity, so V-band antennas are smaller. At the extreme, use lasers. But higher frequencies suffer much more from rain, clouds and other atmospheric effects. C-band gets through easily, while Ku, Ka, V, ...,infrared, visible, ....) suffer progressively more. But the effects are fairly local, so a theoretical fully integrated system could use the lower frequencies for customers whose higher frequencies are degraded. (back to the days of the old 4-foot diameter C-band dish, though.)

I mentioned the V-band constellation because they are in lower orbits, so they will have smaller beam spots even with the same beam angle. I think the Gen2 constellation, which is partly at lower orbits, is Ka/Ku band so it should be decent in the rain too.

[Robotbeat]

While it would be true if you were talking all rural broadband, I actually disagree because he mentions *satellite* broadband. Starlink has more satellites in orbit than all other such services combined, so Starlink has better line of site than all others combined. Capacity limitations have a similar argument, although literally today that might be true it’s extremely unlikely in the medium term.

Tim F has lost credibility, from claiming firm sources that ended up undercounting the number of satellites per launch before Starlink v0.9, to claiming SpaceX had entirely abandoned the idea of laser links to claiming they couldn’t use the dense stack of cards deployment method with lasers… I’m not sure why anyone considers him credible any more.

SpaceX has over 140,000 subscribers. It won’t take very long for them to reach 500,000. I predict by end of 2024.

He said Starlink won't be the only option for sat broadband worldwide. Which is almost certainly true, but not very meaningful. Some countries will prefer domestic competitors, and may refuse to license Starlink or emplace onerous requirements for that reason. The GEO companies serving direct to consumer internet are also probably going to stick around, but their revenues are going to take a big hit.

The 500k is a US-only figure. The claim that they can't reach that in the US is silly. It's probably technically possible for Starlink to service that many US customers with only the 1800 sats in orbit today, while still keeping the 95% percentile speed above 50 Mbps, if they could get the dish components they need.

Higher frequencies allow smaller antennas with the same directivity, so V-band antennas are smaller. At the extreme, use lasers. But higher frequencies suffer much more from rain, clouds and other atmospheric effects. C-band gets through easily, while Ku, Ka, V, ...,infrared, visible, ....) suffer progressively more. But the effects are fairly local, so a theoretical fully integrated system could use the lower frequencies for customers whose higher frequencies are degraded. (back to the days of the old 4-foot diameter C-band dish, though.)

I mentioned the V-band constellation because they are in lower orbits, so they will have smaller beam spots even with the same beam angle. I think the Gen2 constellation, which is partly at lower orbits, is Ka/Ku band so it should be decent in the rain too.

Agreed. But… He goes farther than “will not” (which as you say is trivial… Viasat and others will operate their satellites until they fail even if there is no upgrade) and says /cannot/.

[DanClemmensen]

While it would be true if you were talking all rural broadband, I actually disagree because he mentions *satellite* broadband. Starlink has more satellites in orbit than all other such services combined, so Starlink has better line of site than all others combined. Capacity limitations have a similar argument, although literally today that might be true it’s extremely unlikely in the medium term.

Tim F has lost credibility, from claiming firm sources that ended up undercounting the number of satellites per launch before Starlink v0.9, to claiming SpaceX had entirely abandoned the idea of laser links to claiming they couldn’t use the dense stack of cards deployment method with lasers… I’m not sure why anyone considers him credible any more.

SpaceX has over 140,000 subscribers. It won’t take very long for them to reach 500,000. I predict by end of 2024.

He said Starlink won't be the only option for sat broadband worldwide. Which is almost certainly true, but not very meaningful. Some countries will prefer domestic competitors, and may refuse to license Starlink or emplace onerous requirements for that reason. The GEO companies serving direct to consumer internet are also probably going to stick around, but their revenues are going to take a big hit.

The 500k is a US-only figure. The claim that they can't reach that in the US is silly. It's probably technically possible for Starlink to service that many US customers with only the 1800 sats in orbit today, while still keeping the 95% percentile speed above 50 Mbps, if they could get the dish components they need.

Higher frequencies allow smaller antennas with the same directivity, so V-band antennas are smaller. At the extreme, use lasers. But higher frequencies suffer much more from rain, clouds and other atmospheric effects. C-band gets through easily, while Ku, Ka, V, ...,infrared, visible, ....) suffer progressively more. But the effects are fairly local, so a theoretical fully integrated system could use the lower frequencies for customers whose higher frequencies are degraded. (back to the days of the old 4-foot diameter C-band dish, though.)

I mentioned the V-band constellation because they are in lower orbits, so they will have smaller beam spots even with the same beam angle. I think the Gen2 constellation, which is partly at lower orbits, is Ka/Ku band so it should be decent in the rain too.

Agreed. But… He goes farther than “will not” (which as you say is trivial… Viasat and others will operate their satellites until they fail even if there is no upgrade) and says /cannot/.

Rain fade is important in Ku and even more important in Ka.  If you have real-time info on your customers' error performance, you can watch a storm front move through an area on a map as the little dots drop off the net and then come back.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

While it would be true if you were talking all rural broadband, I actually disagree because he mentions *satellite* broadband. Starlink has more satellites in orbit than all other such services combined, so Starlink has better line of site than all others combined. Capacity limitations have a similar argument, although literally today that might be true it’s extremely unlikely in the medium term.

Tim F has lost credibility, from claiming firm sources that ended up undercounting the number of satellites per launch before Starlink v0.9, to claiming SpaceX had entirely abandoned the idea of laser links to claiming they couldn’t use the dense stack of cards deployment method with lasers… I’m not sure why anyone considers him credible any more.

SpaceX has over 140,000 subscribers. It won’t take very long for them to reach 500,000. I predict by end of 2024.

He said Starlink won't be the only option for sat broadband worldwide. Which is almost certainly true, but not very meaningful. Some countries will prefer domestic competitors, and may refuse to license Starlink or emplace onerous requirements for that reason. The GEO companies serving direct to consumer internet are also probably going to stick around, but their revenues are going to take a big hit.

The 500k is a US-only figure. The claim that they can't reach that in the US is silly. It's probably technically possible for Starlink to service that many US customers with only the 1800 sats in orbit today, while still keeping the 95% percentile speed above 50 Mbps, if they could get the dish components they need.

Higher frequencies allow smaller antennas with the same directivity, so V-band antennas are smaller. At the extreme, use lasers. But higher frequencies suffer much more from rain, clouds and other atmospheric effects. C-band gets through easily, while Ku, Ka, V, ...,infrared, visible, ....) suffer progressively more. But the effects are fairly local, so a theoretical fully integrated system could use the lower frequencies for customers whose higher frequencies are degraded. (back to the days of the old 4-foot diameter C-band dish, though.)

I mentioned the V-band constellation because they are in lower orbits, so they will have smaller beam spots even with the same beam angle. I think the Gen2 constellation, which is partly at lower orbits, is Ka/Ku band so it should be decent in the rain too.

Agreed. But… He goes farther than “will not” (which as you say is trivial… Viasat and others will operate their satellites until they fail even if there is no upgrade) and says /cannot/.

Rain fade is important in Ku and even more important in Ka.  If you have real-time info on your customers' error performance, you can watch a storm front move through an area on a map as the little dots drop off the net and then come back.

Unless the heavy rainfall is on top of the Starlink terminal it is unlikely to drop out. Currently with lower sat density it is aggravated but as sat numbers increase then the number of alternate link paths that do not go through a fade condition increases. So in the long term atmospheric effects will become less and less of a problem. This is true for all the LEO constellation broadband comm systems.

[RedLineTrain]

If that 140,000 number is correct that is a gain of 50,000 in a period of about 6 months. Such that late this summer or early fall the subscribers numbers will be 200,000. In am still awaiting the new terminal factory to become operational. Once it does since the subscriber count growth rate is dependent on available terminals and not demand. Because demand is outstripping the terminal supply and continues growing. Expect the subscriber growth rate to increase by a factor of 4 to 10 after the plant goes online. Such that subscriber growth would be per year somewhere between 400,000 to 1,000,000 per year. Once this occurs then the demand limitations will start to play a part but likely not until subscriber totals reach a couple million. All of this will likely mean the subscribers will reach 1,000,000 by end of 2024 and possibly significantly more depending on the length of time the new plant had been in operation.

Robotbeat, your estimate of 500,000 should be considered the minimum. To determine the most likely to many unknowns have to be resolved to get a clearer picture of how fast subscriber growth will become. Because until production of terminals matches or exceeds the demand, the true subscriber growth curves and predictions will have very wide min and max range numbers.

But let's not discount the terminal capacity out of Hawthorne.  From what SpaceX has said, it seems possible that capacity in Hawthorne is or soon will be hundreds of thousands of terminals a year.

I went back and checked the timing of the Austin factory.  It was last touched May 15.

[meekGee]

While it would be true if you were talking all rural broadband, I actually disagree because he mentions *satellite* broadband. Starlink has more satellites in orbit than all other such services combined, so Starlink has better line of site than all others combined. Capacity limitations have a similar argument, although literally today that might be true it’s extremely unlikely in the medium term.

Tim F has lost credibility, from claiming firm sources that ended up undercounting the number of satellites per launch before Starlink v0.9, to claiming SpaceX had entirely abandoned the idea of laser links to claiming they couldn’t use the dense stack of cards deployment method with lasers… I’m not sure why anyone considers him credible any more.

SpaceX has over 140,000 subscribers. It won’t take very long for them to reach 500,000. I predict by end of 2024.

I don't think that's strictly true.

I think all the satellite constellations have 2-3 usable satellites in each axis depending on the phasing (so 4-9 in total)

Starlink flies lower, so needs more satellites to achieve the same goal.

[woods170]

Tim Farrar is at it again...

Why do people still pay attention to that man? He has been proven incorrect so many times that it is beyond pathetic; it has become hilarious in the worst possible manner.

[woods170]

Tim Farrar is at it again: Starlink's reach won’t be enough to solve rural broadband dilemma — Farrar

Because there is only a finite amount of spectrum available to LEO broadband systems such as Starlink (which must be shared with other LEO systems within the U.S., according to FCC rules), only a limited amount of capacity can be delivered to users in a given area, regardless of the number of Starlink satellites in the sky.

It is therefore far from clear that Starlink will be capable of serving a comparable number of customers to Viasat and Hughes (i.e. in excess of 500K subscribers), let alone a significant proportion of the millions of homes in the U.S. that currently lack terrestrial broadband, in the medium term.

Overall, while Starlink represents an admirable first attempt to develop a LEO broadband system and bring more choices to rural U.S. consumers, it cannot and will not become the only option for satellite broadband in the U.S. or around the world, because in many areas at least some potential customers will be unable to access Starlink, due to capacity limitations and/or the difficulty of securing a reliable line-of-sight to the constellation.

Starlink will have less than 500K subscribers? We'll see...

It will be interesting to see what kind of response he will have if Starlink gets anywhere close to their long term goal of 10gb connections to its users.

Per his usual MO he will simply move the goalposts again. Like he always does when one of his so-called "predictions" is proven to be wrong.

[vsatman]

I mentioned the V-band constellation because they are in lower orbits, so they will have smaller beam spots even with the same beam angle. I think the Gen2 constellation, which is partly at lower orbits, is Ka/Ku band so it should be decent in the rain too.

If you believe this slide from SpaceX's letter to the FSS, you can say that StarLink is unlikely to develop constellation in V band

[su27k]

https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1482742381141282821

A bad batch?
Starlink launch V1.0-L22 consists of 60 satellites launched in Mar 2021.  12 of them have now been lowered to reentry after being held at 350 km (not orbit raising to operational service) - a 20% failure rate.


As the height-vs-time diagram shows, many of the ones that were in service were held back for a while too. Contrast with V1.0-L23 (launch Apr 2021) where all 60 sats are in service after a more systematic plane-drift-then-raise campaign


To be clear, the L22 sats "failed" in the sense of not being used for operational service. But their propulsion systems remained operable and they were safely disposed of, so they were NOT drifting space junk (until the last few days before reentry)

[su27k]

Tim Farrar is at it again (He's been a busy beaver lately, I wonder why, could be linked to new broadband funding from the infrastructure bill?), weird that he basically retracted the two reasons against Starlink in his previous op-ed, and went back to "competition from terrestrial broadband" as the reason why this may not work: Op-ed | LEO broadband: Will this time be different?

What is clear is that expectations for what Starlink can achieve in terms of closing the broadband gap in the U.S. must remain realistic. Fortunately, most of the commentators who made hyperbolic statements a couple of years ago that the U.S. should rely on Starlink instead of building more fiber have quieted down. However, some Wall Street firms still predict huge growth that supports a $100 billion-plus valuation for SpaceX, perhaps motivated by their desire to lead a future SpaceX IPO. To some degree, SpaceX itself was at pains to downplay expectations during 2021 and emphasize that Starlink will only be the best solution for the last few percent of users in rural areas. But that was also the route that Iridium took in the 1990s. When it became clear that satellite phones wouldn’t provide a realistic alternative to terrestrial cellular because of high costs and the inability to operate in most buildings, Iridium’s mantra became that it only needed 1% of the cellular market to be hugely successful. Today, it is far from clear that Starlink can achieve what it promised in winning bids to serve 600,000-plus homes in the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction, without its much more ambitious version 2 constellation. And if the market for consumer satellite broadband does not grow dramatically, then that version 2 system — and the whole Starlink plan — may eventually crumble.

We will not know one way or the other about the ultimate size of this market during 2022, but with SpaceX representing the lynchpin of the NewSpace ecosystem, the risk has never been greater that we will ultimately see a repeat of the 1999-2001 crash in the satellite sector.

[Reynold]

Cross posted from the FCC licensing thread, an article about "ruggedized" high performance terminals aimed, as has been discussed here, at enterprise users.   

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-seeks-to-deploy-ruggedized-starlink-satellite-dish-for-buildings

Presumably those would be higher margin than household, especially since the plan is to only install them with" qualified" personnel. 

[docmordrid]

Tim Farrar has written an editorial for Space News 🙄

https://spacenews.com/op-ed-leo-broadband-will-this-time-be-different/

[Robotbeat]

LOL, it’s already different. Already Starlink is bigger than Teledesic was ever going to be and it has like 140,000-200,000 users.

Sucks for Tim and employer ViaSat.

[envy887]

LOL, it’s already different. Already Starlink is bigger than Teledesic was ever going to be and it has like 140,000-200,000 users.

Sucks for Tim and employer ViaSat.

The funniest part is that his whole argument boils down to "but ViaSat is losing customers!" and therefore Starlink can't succeed.

[vsatman]

Each StarLink satellite has 16 beams and can serve 2000+ users

more
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/each-starlink-satellite-has-16-beams-can-serve-2000-users-pekhterev/