SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up with 1M

Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by yardie on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @05:13PM (#37576782)

I'm sure it will get to 20M paying customers, eventually. But most of the inhabited planet is well served by terrestrial 4G/LTE. And the places that don't have terrestrial mobile service are also largely unpopulated. It's great for ships, but that's still in the 100k range. The Russia/Ukraine war has proved its effectiveness. But that is still just 1000s of terminals.

In every instance where Starlink could be more usable than terrestrial we're talking a few million at most.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by lukev on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @06:07PM (#37577580)

Also, Musk yanking the plug on an active operation does not bode well for that sort of use case.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by dsabanin on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @11:39PM (#37580125)

That can be solved by legislation if necessary.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by rlt on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @04:49PM (#37589972)

Except that’s not what happened. Starlink was not active in Crimea at the time because the US had sanctions in Crimea. He got a request from the Ukrainian government. He has stated if he got a request from the US government he would have activated it.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by serf on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @07:03PM (#37578281)

2500+250/mo is steep for the marine use device , especially when a lot of emergency-use data equivalents will charge you by the byte -- which makes the devices make good sense to have aboard but never used.

I know of a lot of mariners that would probably bite at Starlink if an equivalent pay-as-you-need service was offered,even with the pricey equipment.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by inemesitaffia on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @04:35PM (#37589805)

Starlink has what you speak of

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by spikels on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @02:38PM (#37588113)

There are “more than 100,000” Starlink terminals in Ukraine according to the new Musk bio.

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Re:SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up w... by jfengel on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @03:02PM (#37588527)

What's the bandwidth on 4G? Not a telecomms engineer, but data service can be very pricey, so I assumed it was kind of a limited resource.

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