I imagine once Starlink is an actual choice, the telecoms will install wireless at the end of the fiber and offer you faster, more reliable service than Starlink.
They don't do it now because they get your money without having to do anything at all.
T-Mobile Home Internet is already available to 30M households in the US (out of around 130M households so around 20-25% of US households). T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M subscribers within the next 5 years which would make them the 4th largest ISP (behind Xfinity, Spectrum, and AT&T). Verizon is looking to cover 50M households by the end of 2024 which is years away, but shows that 5G home internet is coming.
Wired home internet companies aren't avoiding installing a wireless link at the end of their fiber out of spite. It's a combination of who has wireless spectrum and the technology/capacity available. If you're talking about Xfinity or Spectrum, they don't have the wireless spectrum to offer that. If you're talking about Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile, they're working on it, but it takes time for the technology and spectrum to be there to provide the capacity people expect for a home internet connection. The recently concluded C-Band auction means that wireless carriers are going to have more spectrum available to provide more capacity (and they spent nearly $100B getting it). 5G NR provides more speed and capacity.
If it was just out of spite, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have been offering wireless home internet for years in areas where they had no wired network. They weren't getting the money in places where they didn't own the local telco (which for T-Mobile is everywhere and for Verizon/AT&T is most places). Even when they owned the local telco, most people would be buying cable internet.
The problem is that home internet isn't easy. A wireless customer probably uses 10GB of data on average. Streaming HD Netflix is 2-3GB per hour. Home internet usage is usually an order of magnitude higher (and can be even higher than that). Basically, you need to increase your network capacity by at least 10x if you're going to be signing up home internet customers. With new technologies and spectrum, that's what wireless carriers are doing over the next 1-5 years.
I think that terrestrial wireless will be big in the future, but it's not because of Starlink putting pressure on telecoms. It's because their networks are going to be seeing massive capacity upgrades over the next few years that will enable it. Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have loved to offer wireless home internet years ago, but the technology and capacity simply wasn't there. I mean, they did offer home internet years ago, but it often cost hundreds of dollars a month and was only available in really rural areas (not just places that might hate 20Mbps service). But new tech and capacity gains are allowing them to offer new service. T-Mobile is first out of the gate because it got new spectrum earlier, but Verizon and AT&T will be following in the coming years.
But it appears to only be available to people in mid sized cities. In other words, people that already have somewhat acceptable internet service options.
The problem is the metastasis of ridiculous dynamic content that is driving up bandwidth requirements and latency and delivering a reduced quality Internet experience in return, not because dynamic content is intrinsically bad, but because of how it's being utilized.
But in both situations I've lived through recently, the fiber has been just out of reach along main roads for some time now. And I know a bunch of people in similar situations on side streets where AT&T and XFinity declined to extend service after building the infrastructure along main roads to do exactly that.
Anecdote: during 2019's power shut offs because of high winds, my house lost power for 3 days, but my neighbor 25' from me did not lose power. Seems like a similar situation in some ways. Both of our houses were on hills served by separate power lines less than a quarter mile from a main road. The only qualitative difference I can think of is that the last 200 ft to my house is below ground.
Upgrading to my first 5G phone recently made voice service work at my house but did nothing for data.
Keep in mind T-Mobile and AT&T are entirely different providers. AT&T coverage may be better where you live.
Edit: I just walked through the neighborhood repeatedly invoking speed test and I can get 50 megabits at various points. But I can't get it anywhere on my own property. There's no real rhyme or reason that I can see as to where it's good and to where it's bad.
I'm a little worried about it. Other than Amazon's Project Kuiper, I don't really see who else can compete.
Unlike EVs there's not an existing industry that's doing _mostly_ the same thing, that just needs to start offering a new line. Running a LEO megaconstellation is extremely different than putting up a handful of massive geostationary satellites. I just don't see the existing satellite internet players being able to compete.
Frankly, it's a massive investment of resources to get started (which is true for auto manufacturers as well), but doing it economically requires launch costs that only SpaceX is currently able to provide.
Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX. Which is why I think Amazon's Kuiper is the best shot to compete—but it requires Blue Origin's New Glenn to come online to really get the economics working. I know Amazon has tapped ULA as a launch provider in the interim, so they'll be able to start getting satellites up and running soon, but the economics seem...painful if they're going to use expendable rockets for the bulk of the constellation.
It's definitely possible that we see a flourishing of offerings, but I could also see a world where in 5 years time there's really only still Starlink.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Again, imho, the huge thing here is the ability to get a quick internet set up anywhere in the world that can't easily be taken down (...military).
With regard to satellite Internet mega-constellations, it is true thus far. The two other major constellations (OneWeb and Kuiper) have avoided SpaceX as a launch provider, choosing competitors instead – OneWeb has gone with Arianespace Soyuz and Virgin; Kuiper has chosen ULA (and is assumably going to choose Blue Origin too once they are ready). SpaceX has said they are happy to launch competitor constellations, but it makes sense that its competitors aren't happy to fund their competition. It is very unlikely that Arianespace or ULA can actually beat SpaceX on price, so avoiding funding your competition is the only logical explanation for OneWeb and Kuiper's decisions.
SpaceX is launching other satellite telecommunications systems, that obviously also compete with Starlink to some extent, but less head-on. For example, they are contracted to launch one of the ViaSat-3 satellites. ViaSat-3 is a satellite Internet constellation, so in that sense does compete, but it only has 3 satellites in geostationary orbit, so it isn't really going after the same direct market as Starlink. (ViaSat appears to be getting scared of Starlink, as evidenced by their anti-Starlink applications to FCC and threats of a lawsuit; given that, I wonder how much longer they'll be willing to buy launch services from SpaceX.)
It’d be great if they were still working on it, though
They have done 8 launches so far, including 4 this year, with another 5 scheduled this year and then more next year. At the moment they have 248 operational satellites in their constellation. Their goal is 648 satellites, which is gong to take them (approximately) 11 more launches.
But 648, is quite small in scale compared to Starlink's plan for an initial constellation of 12,000, with an additional 30,000 currently going through the approval process. Starlink already has more working satellites in orbit than OneWeb's planned full constellation size.
Given that, it is difficult for OneWeb to compete with Starlink head-on, so they are basically ceding to Starlink the B2C space and going after B2B instead. I think with UK government and UK military they are going to have some success, since the UK will likely prefer OneWeb given that it is a UK-headquartered company with partial UK government ownership.
I think competition in this space is important in the long run.
That’s certainly true, but there are real physical limitations that make it hard to compete with Starlink without a LEO constellation.
Sure, you could do ground based infrastructure build outs, but the population density means it’s not profitable or you have to charge really high rates to make up the fixed costs. Other satellite providers can compete in the rural areas, but Geo and LEO are have important differences. The first is latency (internet is internet but 60ms internet is not the same as 600ms internet).
When I made the statement I did, I was mostly referring to satellite internet providers, because land based providers have largely abandoned or drastically underserved this market segment.
I don’t see a GEO constellation being able to provide a similar internet offering to Starlink ever, due to light delay. I don’t think ground based solutions will pop up to start competing for these low density market, because they’ve already been written off as unprofitable even before there was serious competition for the market.
> This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Well that’s probably because the naysayers were predicting the exact same thing as the supporters. Spaced has described Starlink consistently as being designed to service rural and suburban areas that are underserved by existing providers. The goals never were to compete with providers in super high density urban markets.
I’ve been a huge supporter of Starlink since the first announcement, and it’s shaping up pretty much how I imagined which also lines up with your description.
I mean that's what Elon Musk himself said of the service. He said they don't really have interest in competing with most cable/fiber providers and that their system would actually be complementary and they could provide network backhaul for those companies to say remote cellular antennas.
I don't think we'll get there any time soon (or ever), but kind of an interesting thought experiment.
That is, if we had an very large number of companies wanting to create satellite internet constellations, we would run out of useful EM spectrum before we would run out of LEO orbits.
I'm not positive about that, though!
I don’t think anyone would worry about 1800 or even 180000 things spread over the entire surface of the earth. We have billions of cars, and they mostly avoid running into each other. Even 100 miles up? Far, far more space - and a lot less ‘stuff’ to worry about too.
They could pack a million satellites up there and basic traffic management would be more than enough to avoid collisions.
But it's definitely don't comparable to cars. Say you want safety margin of mere 1 second, that means reserving 8 kilometers free corridor in front of every satellite. At all times. That isn't a small volume.
Airplanes are only required to keep 1,000 to 2,000 feet vertical separation. They travel at much slower speed than satellites (550 mph vs. 17,200 mph), but they are also much bigger. They tend to travel in narrow corridors, as opposed to being spread out like satellites.
NASA and SpaceX have started working together to address the collision issues with their fleet:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-spacex-sign-joint-sp...
I suspect more safety time will be required. Say a micrometeoroid impact happens causing one satellite to go off track. Now the controller computer needs some time to recompute whole swarm trajectories to minimize debris impacts. Even sats that are currently on the other side of planet might need to start thrusters immediately, as it takes only 10 minutes on average to cover the distance.
4 * 3.1459 * (6378^2)
Starlink is orbiting at 550km altitude (approx). At that altitude, we’re looking at…
4 * 3.1459 * (6928^2) = 603,977,365 km2
The thing to keep in mind about orbits is the defining factor is your eccentricity and velocity. Faster velocity == higher orbit, assuming it’s a round/circular orbit, that velocity will also be consistent.
As long as everyone is going in the same direction and trying to maintain a circular orbit, you can stack orbits ‘on top’ of each other or put satellites quite close to each other just like planes do with flight levels. So even that number is misleading, as you could 10x that if you had decent traffic control.
Even without that, you’re talking a density of 1 satellite per 600 square kilometers of space with a million satellites for a given ‘flight level’.
The velocity matters a lot less than the relative velocity to other things you might be nearby - think of it like two cars going in lanes next to each other on the same ‘direction’ of a freeway, vs a free for all demolition derby with no traffic control, lanes, etc.
If everyone is co-ordinated you can have problem free high density. If random stuff is happening, including people potentially trying to hit you - it’s going to be a mess. If everyone just does whatever and never co-ordinates, yeah someone is eventually going to run into someone else - but unless there are a LOT of satellites, the odds are low.
With it being LEO, debris and dead satellites are also going to be a aerobraked pretty quickly.
2) Many of these incidents are from people are also putting things in Lagrange points and Geosynchronous orbits, and similar 'crowded' areas of space - unlike these constellations. Think jostling for space in downtown Manhattan, vs being fine having a place in Kansas somewhere.
3) Right now it's mostly a demolition derby out there, with only minimal traffic handling/control and the occasional 'haha, I got you' intentional satellite explosion/missile test.
As noted, even with all those factors, it is still incredibly rare. Only a tiny handful of problems have been tracked to orbital collisions with anything man made, and that is with us putting all sorts of things (including 'off the books' military top secret satellites, nuclear reactors, random bits of micro satellites, etc.) up there since the 50's.
Months is pretty quick for this kind of thing - and remember, unless it gets energy from some kind of serious-delta-v impact (or other delta-V adding type of event like a high energy explosion), it will lose velocity and DROP in altitude if the orbit remains circular. If the orbit doesn't remain circular, especially at LEO, it will have to dip significantly into the atmosphere to get to a higher altitude at any point in it's orbit, meaning even faster degradation and burn-up.
The reality is that it's huge up there, and if we do even basic thinking and planning on this to not do something obviously dumb (like tangential, perpendicular, or opposite direction orbits all over the place at the same level), it isn't likely to be a significant problem; just like it hasn't been a real (as in significant probability event) problem so far.
Cosmic rays, high potential static build-up, magnetic storms, micrometeorites, etc. are just as big or more of a problem. They rarely cancel a mission or damage anything notable, but it isn't zero risk there either.
Satellites are actually manually maneuvered generally. Only the large constellations have somewhat automated systems (SpaceX's system is especially automated because there's too many for humans to monitor).
The analogy with cars is a bit tricky though as we have well defined rules that help us pack them very closely together on the surface. For example: roads, lanes, controlled intersections. Those things aren't quite the same when talking about orbits because cars and satellites aren't spread out the same way.
The other commenter made the point about some safety margin, which obviously has to be a part of the equation. The speed and error of orbits would play into whatever that number comes out to be.
Regardless of there being lots of space, there's still some limit, even if it's 1,000 constellations.
Some variables I don't quite know:
1. Acceptable altitude range for constellations
2. Typical positioning error of a satellite
3. Average failure rate and failure mode of a satellite
- ex. does a dead satellite automatically deorbit itself or do we need to wait for the orbit to decay? I'd imagine decay at that altitude is fairly quick. Would a decaying satellite in a higher orbit need to be accounted for?
I'm sure there are other factors, too...
Cubically.
Except the laws of physics I guess. Geosynchronous orbit is about 36,000 km out so best case scenario if you were going straight up to a satellite in such an orbit and back down even at the speed of light in a vacuum that’s a lower bound of a quarter of a second of latency. So unless these legacy satellite internet companies launch LEO constellations of their own, which there’s no indication they’re capable of doing, it seems pretty hopeless for them.
Well, they can’t improve the latency of their service due to light delay. If they want to compete on that front, they need to move to a LEO constellation.
Neither HughesNet nor ViaSat has started working on LEO constellations (publicly anyway), and these things take years. If they want to get into LEO constellations, they’ve ceded a 5 year head start to SpaceX.
I’m not optimistic that either of them will be able to remain competitive with Starlink over the next decade.
I’d love to dig into the other offerings that the GEO players plan to provide. My dad was a Day 1 sign up for the Starlink beta, because it’s dramatically better than any offerings in his area (including existing Satellite), but I’d definitely like to share any better upcoming options with him.
I think latency might be a deal breaker for him, because they do a fair amount of video calling and don’t like the audio lag
Now, these numbers are all well and good, but they don't include the cost of the ground system and the terminals, and I don't know what those will be. But, I would expect them to be cheaper, most crucially because GEO gives you more flexibility in where you place ground stations (vs LEO) and once you aim the dish, you pretty much never have to move it (LEO dishes spend their whole life slewing to match the satellites; it turns out that requires some parts that aren't so cheap.)
Anyway, I don't know what Starlink or Viasat's pricing will be in a few years, but I think Viasat will have a competitive edge in terms of overall cost.
Latency is definitely an issue for some users and some applications. If you watch what Hughes has been saying for years, it's that the future is hybrid, where a terminal uses both LEO and GEO, for what they're best suited for (i.e., interactive traffic over LEO, big, cheap bulk bits over GEO.) If you Google a bit, you can see the Viasat press releases alluding to this same capability. I don't know if/when that tech will make it to residential service, but I would expect that if there's unmet market demand, they'll get it out there.
I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time.
I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries.
Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats
Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? Yeah, I guess it would, but, that's not going to happen. Whereas California has several volcanoes that - while we've no reason to expect them to erupt this year - certainly can't be ruled out for our lifetimes, so, makes sense to manage that risk not worry about New York.
† A Starlink, or a GPS bird, has a "ball of yarn" orbit, it doesn't really matter which part of the planet it's over at any particular time so long as we can predict where it'll be for the near future. But the whole point of a Geostationary satellite is its apparent fixed location in the sky from a point on the ground. To do that it needs to orbit at the same rate the Earth spins, limiting the orbital radius to a tight band - and it also needs to orbit over the equator, the result is all GEO birds are in more or less identical orbits, just offset in time.
If we have a collision that causes a significant amount of debris in a medium earth orbit, that debris will continue to exist for a very long time, so a wide portion of that orbit will be unusable or dangerous.
> Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? Yeah, I guess it would, but, that's not going to happen.
That's fair, but I think your analogy might fall down on the comparative risks of damaged or destroyed satellites in LEO/MEO compared to the comparative risks of volcanic activity in CA/NY.
Yes, it's true that there is a larger risk of collisions in LEO with the number of satellites operating there. And it's true with the larger number of satellites, there are more risks of a satellite losing control. But that doesn't mean GEO and MEO satellites are without risk. Just last year there was a significant risk that a GEO satellite had the potential to explode due to a failing battery (https://spacenews.com/directv-fears-explosion-risk-from-sate...).
I'm mostly interested in hedging against worst case scenarios, and the worst case scenario for a LEO constellation is much less problematic than the worst case scenarios for MEO constellations.
It's unlikely that they (Starlink or someone else) will offer symmetrical speeds. It's not that they're looking to be mean to you. It's that uplink is harder and people use a lot more downlink.
Even if they dedicated as much wireless spectrum to downlink and uplink, uplink would likely be slower. We see this on traditional cell networks. They dedicate as much spectrum to uplink as downlink, but their cell tower is able to better transmit than your equipment and so the downlink becomes faster. Even with so many more users downloading than uploading (and causing congestion), the downlink is usually faster.
Newer wireless networks aren't going to dedicate equal spectrum to downlink and uplink (using time-division instead of frequency division to separate downlink and uplink). Again, this isn't to be mean to you. It's just a reality that people use a lot more downlink bandwidth than uplink. Starlink isn't immune from that reality.
Elon Musk has already said that they should be able to hit 500,000 customers, but that scaling to millions of customers will be difficult. They're going to have to cap how many people get service in an area and/or put in network management to make sure that some users don't use up all the bandwidth from others nearby.
They're also going to need to focus on downlink capacity to serve what users need. That doesn't mean unusable uplink. As you noted, 10-25Mbps uplink is an important improvement. But wireless internet options (including Starlink) will need to balance that with the downlink capacity users need.
> We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that
Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just be a couple years away. It's probably one of the big reasons why wired companies won't want to be spending money expanding networks in suburban/rural areas. Let's say that you invest in a network expansion and you expect to make it back over the next 20 years. Then 3 years into your investment, Starlink, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering home internet service to your customers. Sure, your fiber network might be "better", but that will only attract some users. Others might get a package deal from their wireless carrier giving them a better price. Now you go from having 90% of households to 50% of households and the investment that you made probably won't work out. For most people, 100Mbps is plenty. Sure, some people love the low-ping times of fiber and love gigabit speeds. People like us here on HN. For most people, they want to be able to use Netflix/YouTube/Facebook/etc. and there's going to be a lot of competition for that market.
> Now imagine that at a national level
Realistically, this already exists on the national level in that we spend billions subsidizing rural connections. Starlink is receiving lots of government money to provide rural internet. I think a big question is whether Starlink is looking to grow well beyond what the government will subsidize and whether government subsidies will flow to other companies more. I'm sure that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon are all looking at what rural internet subsidies might come their way as they launch rural home internet.
We do have some political will to fix the situation, but it's a very expensive situation to fix for a lot of rural areas in a wired way. Should people in cities subsidize suburban/rural lifestyles? As a country, we pour money into roads, low fuel prices (even as climate change ravages the planet), rural telecommunications, etc. If every home in your area is on 2 acres of land, it's going to cost more to wire up the place, it's going to cost more to get roads everywhere, it's going to use more fuel to get from place to place.
We do spend a lot making rural internet happen. It's just an expensive proposition. Heck, Starlink is very expensive at a $550 startup cost + $100/mo. That isn't cheap competition to wired internet - and that's after large government subsidies that might end up being $2,000 per user. Starlink has received $900M in federal money and Elon Musk is hoping to serve 500,000 users so that would be $1,800 per user from the government. That's not the $5,000 your service provider wanted to extend fiber, but it's still a lot of money. Plus, Starlink is likely to be getting more federal money in the future (and they might end up serving a couple million users).
There is political will and we've spent incredible amounts of money over many decades and continue to spend even more. It's just hard to serve many rural areas. If one is in an area with 5 people per square mile, that's a lot of wire for very few users. Wireless/satellite might make the most sense since installing one thing could serve hundreds or thousands of users. Even 20-50 people per square mile can be a lot of work to wire up.
While wireless home internet is in its infancy right now, I'd expect it to get a lot better over the next 5 years. As you noted, your neighbor installed a 20-foot mount to get better reception. T-Mobile Home Internet customers are rigging up directional antennas mounted on the outside of their homes to get better speeds. Given that people install satellite dishes for TV, it seems very reasonable that we'll see wireless antennas installed to offer internet service. Again, when something is in its infancy, there are less options and it's less fully realized. But that will change over time.
I think the next 5 years will be an exciting time for home internet. I don't think that Starlink is going to be doing most of the exciting stuff and I don't think we'll see symmetrical connections, but I think we'll see great stuff that will bring better connections to people who need it and will bring competition to the marketplace to prevent monopoly providers from taking advantage of their customers.
Except... The value of each house would probably increase by $10K-$15K or so:
"Controlling for speed, homes in CBGs where fiber is available have a price that is about 1.3 percent more than similar homes without fiber."
https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural-outrea...
My new neighbors are increasingly tech TLAs as the former generation sells their homes off for 2-3x what they paid 20+ years ago. Median house price in my neighborhood is ~$1.1M ATM.
> Applying this strategy to a micro data set from England between 1995 and 2010 we find a significantly positive effect, but diminishing returns to speed.
England isn’t filled with million dollar homes.
Regardless, we do have Starlink, and it is transformative.
In the UK, BTs 'fibre' rollout is almost exclusively FTTC and then copper phone lines after that. My parents have a phone line from 35 years ago, and the cabinet is maybe half a mile away, but they can get 50 Mbit down (I can't remember upload, maybe around 15 Mbit). The provider rolled this out a lot quicker than ADSL (we never got ADSL2), so I assume it's technically not that complicated.
The New Zealand government invested ~ £750 million into fibre to the premises infrastructure, in partnership with other companies. About 80% of NZ homes have access, with say half of those actually using it, but percentage is growing. Usable plans are about £40 per month. In my city you can’t sign up to a cable connection, even if the house is already wired up for it. I belive you even have trouble signing up for copper, because the infrastructure companies just don’t want to support it. The main competitor left is mobile, although I would love to see StarLink be available here.
There are a lot more people in the UK though, housing is much denser and people are very resistant to change; it's easier to rip up the ground in NZ bc our country has only existed for 150 years, in the UK it's a lot harder with all sorts of caveats/consents.
Same as covid: Jacinda did an excellent job, but at the same time as a realistic kiwi, it's very true that NZ has a very small, spread out population and the benefit of being small and extremely southerly, international travel just isn't as prevalent there as say, Europe.
However actual usage is quite different. If your Internet seems fine, why would you buy a more expensive service that claims to be "faster"? In my city Toob are trying to aggressively acquire customers for FTTP with a price they're presumably losing money on, but I don't expect that to last.
The technology for a setup like your parents is either VDSL or G.fast. Near to their old (perhaps slightly battered) green BT cabinet is a newer one, the newer one has fibre to it, and a DSLAM, the DSLAM ties to the old cabinet with copper, and so only that "maybe half a mile away" distance is covered by the DSL technology, from there it's fibre.
Or build a government run version. though while lots of good reasons to - e.g. low rates, free access for kids etc - letting Gov own even more of our internet is probably not great.
Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.