SpaceX No Longer Taking Losses To Produce Starlink Satellite Antennas (cnbc.com) 108
Elon Musk's SpaceX is no longer absorbing the cost of the Starlink antennas it sells with its satellite internet service, a company executive said Wednesday, a key step to the company improving its profitability. CNBC reports: "We were subsidizing terminals, but we've been iterating on our terminal production so much that we're no longer subsidizing terminals, which is a good place to be," Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, said during a panel at the World Satellite Business Week conference.
SpaceX sells consumer Starlink antennas, also known as user terminals, for $599 each. For more demanding Starlink customers -- such as mobile, maritime or aviation users -- SpaceX sells antennas with its service in a range between $2,500 and $150,000 each. When SpaceX first began selling its Starlink service, company leadership said the terminals cost about $3,000 each to manufacture. The company improved that to about $1,300 per terminal by early 2021. Hofeller's comments Wednesday indicate the terminals now cost less than $600 each to make, mass production savings that Hofeller credited as "one of our keys to success."
SpaceX sells consumer Starlink antennas, also known as user terminals, for $599 each. For more demanding Starlink customers -- such as mobile, maritime or aviation users -- SpaceX sells antennas with its service in a range between $2,500 and $150,000 each. When SpaceX first began selling its Starlink service, company leadership said the terminals cost about $3,000 each to manufacture. The company improved that to about $1,300 per terminal by early 2021. Hofeller's comments Wednesday indicate the terminals now cost less than $600 each to make, mass production savings that Hofeller credited as "one of our keys to success."
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Vlad on the other hand...
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I dunno. With the way Roscosmos is going, ol' Vladdy might have trouble getting it up (to orbit).
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Re: What a coincidence (Score:3, Insightful)
If you look at a recent interview with Tony Blinken, it seems to imply (he could not publicly disclose the reason, but he emphasized Starlink is critical to US efforts in Ukraine) this was on request of the US government.
The US has to corral Ukrainian military from going too deep into Russian territory, it would give Putin reason to enter Poland. Right now, the status quo in effect for the last decade or so is roughly maintained, nobody is making any major changes gains in each otherâ(TM)s territory. B
Re: What a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't see how. Back in 2014 it might seem plausible to hold back to prevent giving Russia a reason to enter Poland but it is hardly something the Russian army is capable of in its current state. The only rationale for that would be to prevent Russia from withdrawing entirely and keep them grinding their military into nothing.
Also that Ukraine has no designs on Russian land, they know that if they cross that border Russians will fight as hard as them to kick out the invader.
NATO, the nations on the border with Russia in particular are concerned about Russian reprisals, things like artillery, rockets and missiles being lobbed into their territory but they also have no love of Russia and would love to see them kicked out of Ukraine. Russia is scared to attack NATO because it knows we can respond in kind and in force and that th
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Russia still has over 1M troops and well over 2M reserves. Europe and the US combined has nothing close to that. Sure, they will suffer losses, and the Russian people CURRENTLY don't want to sacrifice that, but if Ukraine (or that band of mercenaries for that matter) had entered Moscow, this would've galvanized the Russian people behind Putin.
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Russia still has over 1M troops and well over 2M reserves. Europe and the US combined has nothing close to that. Sure, they will suffer losses, and the Russian people CURRENTLY don't want to sacrifice that, but if Ukraine (or that band of mercenaries for that matter) had entered Moscow, this would've galvanized the Russian people behind Putin.
Russia is struggling to feed, equip, train and support the troops it has in the field now. There's no way it could manage another war at the same time.
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Russia still has over 1M troops and well over 2M reserves. Europe and the US combined has nothing close to that. Sure, they will suffer losses, and the Russian people CURRENTLY don't want to sacrifice that, but if Ukraine (or that band of mercenaries for that matter) had entered Moscow, this would've galvanized the Russian people behind Putin.
Russia couldn't even stop Prigozhin and his band of plucky neo-Nazis from taking Rostov-on-Don and from making most of the drive to Moscov as the Russian people (and army) stood on the sidelines waiting to see what happened. They literally needed Lukashenko to step in in order to convince Prigozhin to turn away.
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I don't see how. Back in 2014 it might seem plausible to hold back to prevent giving Russia a reason to enter Poland but it is hardly something the Russian army is capable of in its current state. The only rationale for that would be to prevent Russia from withdrawing entirely and keep them grinding their military into nothing.
Russia was never going to enter NATO partner Poland.
In 2014 the invasion was mostly done by "separatists" (mostly out of uniform Russian army). They had some initial success (esp. Crimea) but the "separatists" couldn't go further into Ukraine without the kind of numbers and heavy weaponry that would make the Russian army involvement official. And Ukraine couldn't retake their territory without the Russian army stepping in to stop them. Hence the stalemate.
The problem with arming Ukraine in 2014 like we're a
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Re: What a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at a recent interview with Tony Blinken, it seems to imply
You don't need to imply anything. This was a Musk decision, not a US decision. Musk took ownership of the decision, despite initially denying it. He even attempted to justify the decision as saying he thought the attack would make Russia deploy nukes, something no one across NATO agreed with.
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The DOD now has the contract for Ukraine miliary data plan and offensive use limits are in their hands (moscow starlink is still a no). I am thinking this is a non issue grabbed by the media to hammer musk.
Musk/SpaceX/Starlink now has indemnity clause, it is not coming back to Starlink if the russian warm water fleet explodes, US DOD provided bandwidth under contract with sta
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and what was the acceptable use policy at the time.
Terms of Service are irrelevant. We're discussing a shitty decision by a shitty person. Whether ToS are breached or not doesn't change the shitty decision, all that it means is that the shitty decision has a shitty ToS document backing the shitty service.
The DOD now has the contract for Ukraine miliary data plan and offensive use limits are in their hands (moscow starlink is still a no).
No the DOD just pays for it. They in no way have any control over how Musk runs the network. In fact there have been considerable and constant vocal disagreements over Musk vs DOD's view on how Starlink works.
Musk/SpaceX/Starlink now has indemnity clause
Completely irrelevant. Musk was on the record wi
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Re: What a coincidence (Score:1)
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Biden keeps sending money, a lot of it goes missing, but you can only milk those kickbacks if Ukraine doesnâ(TM)t get stomped into the ground.
Republicans suddenly get fiscally conservative when a democrat is in office. https://www.thedailybeast.com/... [thedailybeast.com]
Re: What a coincidence (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it should also be pointed out that the vast majority of the "money" being sent is actually surplus military materiel. It's counted as for example, a $1.2 billion dollar package of aid because some accountant somewhere slaps a value on every shell, missile, tank, whatever and adds it all up. Sure, that stuff did have to be paid for at some point, but consider things like Hawk missiles. The US doesn't use them any more. The only reason they were warehousing them is because it costs more to destroy them. However, they still provide some benefit to Ukraine, so they send them there, slap a dollar value on them, add it up and call it X dollars in aid. Sure, there's real money involved as well, but it's not as much as people seem to think.
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Well, yeah, that's the point. Technically, it should be a gain rather than a loss, but it's counted as a loss for accounting purposes. That's complicated by the costs of transport, maintenance, etc. which might work out to less than the future costs of storage, but those depend on unknown factors, such as how long they'll be kept for. Basically, when it gets down to it, no-one has a realistic number for how much is being spent on helping Ukraine.
Ultimately, whatever the cost actually is, it's worth it to pr
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War in general is evil, but there is a very clear distinction between a war fought in defense of an invading force versus a war fought to seize territory from a neighbor. When you add in brutal murder, rape and torture of civilians, mass torture, the kidnapping of children, oppression of civilians in occupied territory, mass pillaging, etc. Then there's a very clear bad guy. Trying to play a game of moral equivocation to say that each side is as bad as the other is ridiculous in the context of what's actual
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I'm not a Republican (I couldn't vote in US elections anyway, unless I crossed the Southern Border), but it seems to me the Republican party itself is split between RINO/NeoCons and New-Age Conservatives, one has become indistinguishable from Democrats, the other is fiscal conservative.
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I'm not a Republican (I couldn't vote in US elections anyway, unless I crossed the Southern Border), but it seems to me the Republican party itself is split between RINO/NeoCons and New-Age Conservatives, one has become indistinguishable from Democrats, the other is fiscal conservative.
Right now there is nothing to stop you from crossing the US Southern Border ... except a brief delay to speak with a US Government tour guide.
Re: What a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
The US has to corral Ukrainian military from going too deep into Russian territory, it would give Putin reason to enter Poland.
That's nonsense though. Poland is in NATO. As much as the NATO countries are trying to see no evil there's no way they could ignore that. Russia is doing very, very poorly against a country that is only being lightly supplied with NATO castoffs. In a direct confrontation with NATO, they would be crushed. So this is just something that is very, very unlikely to happen. At some point, Ukraine's allies are going to need to realize that this war can't end in Ukraine. Even if the Ukrainians drive the Russians all the way out of their 1991 borders, there's absolutely no reason for Putin to come to the negotiating table. Russia can keep on trying to invade, or lobbing missiles at Ukraine indefinitely. Sure, it's possible the political situation in Russia will turn against that, but they're still not going to come to any actual agreement unless Russia has skin in the game. That can't happen unless the Ukrainians are striking deep inside Russia. They need to be taking out airfields, missile sites, defense factories, oilfields and refineries. That way, both Russia's military capacity and their economy take a real hit and there's an actual reason for them to negotiate for a treaty, recognize Ukraine as an independent country (again), maybe even return their kidnapped children.
The whole situation with forbidding attacks on Russia with Western weapons is bizarre. It simultaneously relies on the notion that Putin is so irrational and unstable that he will take steps that are guaranteed to annihilate himself in very short order while also relying on notion that he's going to come to the negotiating table and make sensible diplomatic moves. Those can't both be true.
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Russia has already dropped rockets in Poland (they say accidentally). Biden did nothing. Russia invaded Ukraine on two occasions in the last decade, a country the US had previously guaranteed securities in exchange of nuclear disarmament, Obama did nothing and Biden initially did nothing either.
Poland doesn't have nukes, they're screwed.
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I personally think that Russian provocations, like the rocket fragments in Poland, drones in Romania, Russian pilots bringing down surveillance drones over international waters or literally firing missiles at RAF planes should get more of a response. The West is definitely erring too far on the side of caution. Nevertheless, none of those actions were direct invasion of an Allied country. As for the invasion of Ukraine while security guarantees were in place, I think that also should have gotten a bigger re
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Many have said it is Putin testing the waters. Can I drop a drone in Romania, yes, can I shoot rockets at a military base in Poland, apparently too, can he take out a convoy in Poland because they have supplies that are destined for Ukraine, also goes unpunished.
Re: What a coincidence (Score:1)
Oh look, you managed to drag President Trump into a discussion about SpaceX lowering the build price of its cheapest terminals to under the $600 selling price!
You get a gold star, good for you - now go get yourself checked, I think you've got a serious case of TDS...
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If you are conflating them both, perhaps it's time to look at your beliefs. The moment when wildly disparate groups all have a single goal in mind and you say 'fuck them'...usually the point where you jumped the shark for good.
There's been significant graft associated with Ukraine since the early 2000s...perhaps even earlier, I just don't know about it. Someone is finding it important to protect that source at this moment.
On a personal level, my employer from 2002-2014 spent a lot of time in the Ukraine
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Re: What a coincidence (Score:4, Interesting)
Up until 2014 huh. So, while Ukraine was still being controlled by Russia as a puppet through corrupt government officials. Sure it's hard to sweep away corruption all at once. It infests your entire bureaucracy (this is the "deep state", but not the wacky lunatic fringe conspiracy version of it, just the basic original concept that most of government is actually unelected bureaucrats who keep doing their jobs pretty much the same way regardless of who is in charge at the top) and you can't just replace all of that. Working top down, it can take years to make people understand that you're serious about getting rid of corruption and that they can't get away with it any more. Then it can take decades more to purge all the bad actors. It mostly happens by driving the corruption as far underground as you can and waiting for the already compromised people to age out and retire or die off as they're replaced by people with different ideals. Plus there's backsliding and backlashes and people who just think they can get away with it. There are plenty of people with varying degrees of power for whom corruption is their bread and butter, so they are going to actively fight. That includes powerful organizations like the FSB who promote corruption because it's an easy means of compromise and control.
Anyway, so your friend was in "foreign military sales" and worked between Ukraine and Uzbekistan. So do you think that was selling weapons to Ukraine or selling weapons from or through Ukraine to other places? It seems like it's really hard to tell. I'd say odds are just as good as anything else that he was, for example, actually smuggling Russian weapons from Transnistria through Ukraine to Uzbekistan. Whatever he was doing, regardless of any Ukrainian graft, I'm sure there were Russian fingerprints all over it. That's why Ukraine has been trying to get away from Russia, it's a sick, co-dependent relationship that sucks Ukraine down and makes things worse for the actual people of the country. The Ukrainians looked at the rest of the world, from their deep poverty, and wondered "why can't we live more like that?" and the obvious answer was because of their strangling ties to Russia.
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> How are you claiming with a straight face they are disparate? Both Russians and Republicans don't want an actual democracy.
Technically correct. Republicans want a constitutional republic.
> Both favor authoritarian dictators. ... and you're LOONEY TUNES. https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]
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Two immediate replies.
One implying I'm an idiot because constitutional republics aren't democracies and one implying I'm an idiot because they are overwhelmingly democracies.
Classic slashdot. Likely no one watched the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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It's just as hard seeing the Hawk democrats now.
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Plausible deniability.
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The technical implementation is not the relevant part of this discussion. The reality is that Musk-Almighty ordered that the Ukraine's capabilities be limited because he personally thought that if the Ukraine actually defended themselves the way they were planning that Russia would launch nukes. Precisely zero people in the intelligence community in NATO agrees with that view. And this isn't some conspiracy you can wash away. Musk came right out and admitted that the outage was directly related to not wanti
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But the story certainly distracts from the billions spent on a proxy war with stagnant front lines. It
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sink the Russian warships using drones that has Starlink connectivity
Well that's doubly illegal for SpaceX, because it violates both US sanctions on US companies providing services in Crimea *and* US weapon export controls, so of course they would never allow it.
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False claim, already discredited. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Total coincidence. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/1... [cnbc.com]
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Spoiler alert: It won't.
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We should still be worried about it now. The crux of this has not happened yet - it will happen when Russia faces defeat and has to decide whether to use its tactical nukes, or later if Russia crumbles into chaos and internally-warring factions.
A larger conventional war is now pretty much off the table, since the Russian army turned out to be a paper tiger to
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Why do the reasons sound strange?
Because they are at odds with literally every intelligence organisation on the planet save for Belarus who are busy playing Putin's mouthpiece. Precisely no one thinks this will escalate beyond Ukraine. Putin is very carefully using words and not actions against anyone except Ukraine knowing full well that right now he can't even fight one small country and the war will suddenly get very VERY short if NATO were to be involved.
By the way you can't "escalate a war" (the claim being made by Musk) simply by rec
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Why do the reasons sound strange? Everybody was worried about this ballooning into a larger war. Some declared that WW3 may already have started [nbcnews.com].
Nice slight of hand. Zelenskyy was claiming that it was potentially the start of WWIII because after Ukraine, Russia would turn its focus to other former USSR countries.
He wasn't claiming that Ukraine trying to retake its own territory would expand the war, that's how you actually stop WWIII before it starts.
We should still be worried about it now. The crux of this has not happened yet - it will happen when Russia faces defeat and has to decide whether to use its tactical nukes, or later if Russia crumbles into chaos and internally-warring factions.
Not really. If Russia plays the tactical Nuke card then NATO plays the "we send our planes into Ukraine and there goes your army card".
The mistake is in thinking that we're in a MAAD era. Russia can't e
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Starlink was not turned off. Ukraine requested it be activated in an area where it hadn't been yet. The request was denied, although the reasons given do sound strange.
To expound a bit on what happened:
1) Ukrainians weren't aware that Starlink was turned off over areas of their own occupied country. Seems like a pretty a fairly large communication oversight from SpaceX.
2) Given it was turned off turning it on makes you a pro-active participant in the attack in a way that leaving it on wouldn't.
3) Musk's rationalization for his decision that the Ukrainian attack would be a mini Pearl Harbour that could start a Nuclear war. This was idiotic.
4) Musk has since claimed he turn
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Sounds about right. I hope Musk has the strength of character to apologize for comparing Ukraine retaking their own territory from an aggressor in an active war zone to an unprovoked act of murder.
I doubt it.
At this point I'm just hopeful that the backlash (and people explaining the issue to him) has been strong enough that he won't do stuff to screw with Ukraine again in the future.
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Also (as I recall older news items): (Score:2)
Also (as I recall and interpreted news items at the time - please post correction's if I erred)...
- Russia had knocked / was knocking out Ukraine's internet services to the rest of the world.
- Musk offered (and initially funded) replacement communication via Starlink (including truckloads of free terminals).
- But one of his requirements was that, while the Ukranians could use them for communication (including military communication), they could NOT use it for direct control of milita
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Also (as I recall and interpreted news items at the time - please post correction's if I erred)...
- Russia had knocked / was knocking out Ukraine's internet services to the rest of the world.
- Musk offered (and initially funded) replacement communication via Starlink (including truckloads of free terminals).
- But one of his requirements was that, while the Ukranians could use them for communication (including military communication), they could NOT use it for direct control of military weapon systems such as suicide drones (formerly known as cruise missiles).
I'm not going to go digging through old news articles, but my recollection is at one point well after the Starlink delivery there was a bunch of news articles about Ukrainians finding Starlink wasn't enabled in certain areas of the front line and Musk saying he never anticipated them putting Starlink antennas on a drone.
It was kinda vague at the time, but in retrospect this is probably the incident in question, meaning the specific boundaries for militarization came after the fact.
As I understand it, providing non-direct-weapons-control internet service for Ukrainne mad them, under international law and conventions, the analog of a phone company (like Siemens - the European equivalent of AT&T at the time - which was allowed to provide phone service and equipment to Allied and Axis countries during WW II without government sanction.) Russian attack on the system would be an act of war against a Western infrastructure assed. But letting it be used for direct control of weapon systems made it a weapon system, and Russian government-level attacks on the whole system fair game.
(Also he apparently DID offer to provide a separate satellite-based weapon C&C facility for Ukrane and/or the US if the US would fund it, includinjg the massive work on countermeasures against Russian cyberattack on it, but the administration and/or Pentagon was not interested in cutting such an expensive deal.)
Again, I haven't seen deta
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(Also he apparently DID offer to provide a separate satellite-based weapon C&C facility for Ukrane and/or the US if the US would fund it, includinjg the massive work on countermeasures against Russian cyberattack on it, but the administration and/or Pentagon was not interested in cutting such an expensive deal.)
And apparently later changed their mind. It's called "Starshield", a much smaller satellite constellation, build by SpaceX but owned and operated by the US government.
Follow the news link in the
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Didn't Musk turn it on for free for Ukraine? Is that suppose to be forever?
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They are still subsidizing them. (Score:4, Informative)
Starlink routinely runs promos where the terminals go for $99 or $199 with a contract, just like a cell phone.
So while they have reduced their cost, they are still subsidizing them
Eventually I imagine they will become like other ISPs where the terminal rental cost is just baked into your monthly fee for most subscribers and no one thinks about it.
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It's funny that the only on topic post is marked as a troll
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That's the way things work on slashdot, anymore. You've got to be actively pro-regime or you are considered against it. Doesn't matter if it's topically related to AGW, GWOT, US jingoism, child grooming, sexual mutilation, or who you're voting for - you'd better adhere to regime affinity or you'll get modded troll, overrated, etc.
I'm convinced the moderation isn't being done by actual people, but by bots. There can't possibly be that many people literally trolling /. looking for badthink. It happens quickly
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but what blows my mind is in many "regular" applications, getting internet from OUTER SPACE is easier & cheaper than a terrestrial solution.
Why? It's just a cellular phone system:
- With the cells little satellites in low-earth orbit,
- each "tower" cite a cheap satellite covering a broad (though moving) area, rather than a big ground-based installation.
- each "cell" having a lot more "sectors" than the ground based version.
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Because it is.
A terrestrial solution requires infrastructure - you need power and a network link, and you need people to maintain that infrastructure.
Let's say you erect a wireless solution - you need a tower somewhere and it needs power and an uplink. It also needs people because it needs maintenance. This limits where you can in
easily solved (Score:2)
see, it's an easy problem to solve.
every time the cost drops below price, lower price!'
ta-da!
Boo (Score:2)
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The key to their success is that they've lowered the manufacturing cost of their terminal by a factor of at least five, getting the cost of manufacture under the selling point. Are you suggesting that they should just include the satellite terminal for free?
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yes, but it can get included with your contracts, like phones.
And when it gets old enough, they don't want it back. We just got told we "could" keep the pre-HD equipment from Dish that my mother in law had been using.
Starlink Ukrainian Access Under Investigation (Score:2)
Raising an investment round (Score:2)
In other news, SpaceX is currently running a campaign [spacexipoaccess.com] to
raise money [moonshot.ch].
We do wish them good luck.
Or is it existing investors trying to sell? Well, we wish them good luck too, right?