alt Hacker News> Starlink seems to just print money.
Does it? Those satellites are individually dirt cheap compared to historical communication satellites, but Starlink requires a whole lot of them and they depreciate outrageously quickly.
Compare to my personal favorite communication medium, single-mode-fiber. SMF from 20-30 years ago still works, is compatible with most current-generation wavelengths, and can carry extremely high bandwidth per strand if users are willing to put fancy optics and muxes at the ends or can carry lower speeds at transceiver prices that would have been almost unimaginably low 20 years ago.
Starlink satellites seem to have zero or even slightly negative value after five years.
Getting fiber to a house is relatively expensive, especially houses in more rural areas which is Starlink's main market. A Starlink satellite costs a lot more but can serve many customers.
Let's say a Starlink satellite costs $2 million all-in. (They launch about 25 at a time, the launch costs something like $25 million, add in another million for the satellite itself and operations.) They have about 10,000 satellites in orbit currently, and about 10 million customers. That's about 1,000 customers per satellite, so a five-year cost of $2,000 per customer. That's a fair bit less than it costs to run fiber to a rural house. And Starlink is pretty much a monopoly in their main markets (terrestrial telecoms is usually at least a duopoly) so they can charge more. I pay $85/month for symmetric gigabit fiber. Starlink charges $80/month for 200Mbps, or $120/month for "max." On top of that, they can charge enormous amounts for commercial users like airliners and cruise ships.
According to https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab..., Starlink revenue last year was north of $8 billion. They'd need to launch 2,000 satellites per year to maintain the current fleet. If $2 million is an accurate price tag for them, then that's $4 billion/year. Pretty nice profit, and there's a lot of room for growth.