When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.
While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.
I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.
I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.
I love being off-grid with just my slow inReach Mini 1. I can communicate in case of an emergency, but otherwise it's a great forcing function to not be hyper connected. I worry if I brought the portable Starlink with I'd connect much more than necessary.
Your comment was interesting.
i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?
Starlink satellites are intentionally designed to be very dark, but they become more visible when the sun is about to come up or if there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby to reflect off of them.
Soon enough these will start showing ads - I pray for our night sky.
One cool thing about Starlink is that it can potentially improve latency across the world. In optical fibers the light travels only two thirds as fast due to the index of refraction. But in space you can use a laser to send the data in a straight line in a vacuum.
Is that because China applied to launch 200000 satellites?
no, just no
make them pre-pay a multi-trillion cleanup and cancer fund for all the toxic waste, not just the launches but pollution burning up in the atmosphere
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?
EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?
> How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?
You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.
In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago, with Starlink being the bulk of it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-....
Starlink has 12.5k satellites in space and looking to ramp up massively, the biggest "multi-decade incumbent", oneweb, has 5% as many, about 600.
> How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years."
(And most of the other providers don't plan for theirs to burn up within a few years. Giant disposable LEO constellations are new.)
we cannot have private trillionaires milking "privatize the profits and social the costs"
no more, it has to end immediately
they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society
even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate
pre-pay costs to society before damaging society
also, criminal murder charges for those who enable actions like, "poisoning a water supply," "creating an opiode epidemic," "giving millions of people cancer, knowingly"
I just don't understand why, killing one person is murder, but killing hundreds over many years is, "just the cost of doing business."
The amount of matter which enters Earth's atmosphere from non-manmade sources is far higher than any conceivable amount of space junk today.
But a significantly different makeup than plain old rock dust.
Do you have any proof that starlink satellites are worse than the tons of space debris that enter the atmosphere every day?
The satellites aren't worse. It is the rockets that are worse. On the way up they emit various things into the stratosphere, which is about the worst place you can emit stuff when it comes to affecting the atmosphere.
It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.
(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).
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Musk is nothing if not ambitious
Eh, his promises are ambitious.
And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.
I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.
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soooo good that they'll burn up one day and this nonsense can finally end.
investors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital.
sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!
"...we're good." ? It seems that you are excluding all of the actual users onboard with Starlink tech. I'm one. I had choices and Starlink was a welcome addition to the short list.
In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.
Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.
Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...
Are you maybe swayed to make public comments regarding Starlink and other SpaceX products because of your political opinions instead of facts? This is a valid and sincere question, not an accusation.
Starlink was funded internally by SpaceX. What investors are you talking about?
SpaceX's money came from outside investors.
… and customers. It’s cashflow positive.
not since X.AI got folded in
imagine thinking you speak for the 99.9% lol
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.
Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
No joke, I need to learn how to do this.
A F50 demo client just told me that my single-builder product was better than their interal "AI chat with data" product.
I need a b2b SaaS smart partner. Please contact me at username at the big G, if anyone is down.
> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.
There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.
And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.
To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.
India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.
Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.
Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.
It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.
Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.
I have a really good friend who used Starlink for his cottage in Canada and as soon as there was broadband he switched away. Starlink was unreliable and slow compared to what he has now.
In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.
I have it, I live in a very rural place.
I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.
It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).
But reliability has been almost 100%
I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So now I have starlink as a backup. It's a very small portable unit that I can also take when camping. It's a great service. Also it's powering a lot of airlines now, it's fast and reliable to the point I can watch youtube and tiktok on my flights.
That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.
India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.
India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.
> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.
https://www.spacex.com/starshield
Eeh even ther its a stretch , when people talk about Africa - they should really specify where exactly. PLaces like SouthAfrica [1] already have a robust Fiber network with accelerated buildout of FTTH. Ditto for most of Eastern Africa countries which have FTTH to most of the major cities and subururbs with accelerated buildouts ongoing. Unless its a conflict area most regions are getting wired up pretty fast to enhancce business connectivity - the speeds and bandwith for starlink make noe economic sense once a developing pop are factored in.The only major push for many countries approvals is basically strong armed and shaken down by the US admin on behalf of Musk[2].
[1]https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...
[2]https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...
Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.
OK, so for this, Starlink is AMAZING! In-flight Starlink is undeniable.
The first time I experienced it, I could not believe what was happening. I messaged my nerd friends with screenshots of https://speed.cloudflare.com/
Also, their required zero-friction UX is the shiznit.
Then, I fell asleep as I finally had theoretical time off.
I’ve read so many posts from both CEOs and programmers about their higher in-flight productivity thanks to be offline.
I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.
I believe Viasat internet satellites are placed in geostationary orbit, whereas SpaceX Starlink is not, so the service Viasat provides is already blown out.
And this is exactly why we don't need internet on planes.
Yeah, planes are noisy enough without making them into a call center cubicle farm.
There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet
I feel like no-earth orbit is always going to beat out low-earth orbit in the long-term. I live an area that the USDA classifies as rural and I now have multiple fiber options, including municipal. This isn't to say that Starlink doesn't have its place and I only see it becoming more niche over time and facing more competition in the LEO segment.
I live in what is probably the first place to get these things in the world, but it feels like fiber is being built at an extremely rapid pace. Just in the past couple of years it seems like Google and AT&T fiber went from being a relatively confined thing to being available everywhere in the city, and everywhere outside, and at my friend's ranch 100 miles in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere.
Many places have incompetent government that can't/won't build proper infrastructure. For example, the US has allocated around $50B for rural broadband and almost nothing has been built.
It's very popular in rural US where running wired broadband is cost prohibitive.
There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.
Right the areas that companies took money to roll out high speed internet to, then just kept the money and called DSL high speed or just did nothing. The government should keep giving companies money and investing in them. It's brilliant.
There are many places, even in the US, where your only alternative is--believe it or not--dial-up modems. Others had painfully slow--1 Mbps up, 5 Mbps down--Internet.
i live a few miles west of core Palo Alto (technically, still in Palo Alto); Starlink is my only real choice for broadband, and it's great.
24/7 high fidelity radar of the entire earth’s surface. Probably used by NRO’s sentient system and similar classified skynet projects
It's good to have option in case your own government turns rogue.
Option being Starlink run by the rouge fascist billionaire who tries to use it to manipulate global wars?
Even if your outburst was true, yes.. If your government turns rogue it's better to have 2 options than 1. Period.
People in rural parts of America where ISPs don't want to expand into.
They seem to be expanding even across rural America. These days it's fairly common for small and medium size towns to have access to 500mbps-1gbps for $50-$90 per month, and essentially all small cities and above.
Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.
The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.
Fastest option I can get where I am is 260 Mbps for $250 from a local wireless ISP...
This makes starlink tempting but for that I'd have to run cabling 50 plus. M to get the this where it has a clear view of the sky...
(Edit) A nearby small town is installing municipal fiber right now, which is great, but that's half an hour away.
You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.
Elon listen to this guy, shut it down, he got fiber and switched so bring the satellites down, it's not going to work. Hackernews has become like reddit, shame it used to be good, now it's an Elon bashing woke echo chamber.
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