Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink

Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by breckenedge on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @01:49PM (#40226719)

These are service providers, not rent seekers. By focusing on OpEx above all else, they missed an opportunity to build starlink first. They were doing the right thing as long as nothing ever changed. Now they’re forced to consolidate further and are probably going to disappear.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by MichaelZuo on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @02:26PM (#40227204)

This would only apply if they decided to expand into LEO or MEO.

But if the board decided to stick to Geostationary orbit, they were doing the smart thing by treating it like a real estate business. Because it is literally real estate.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by wrigby on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @03:47PM (#40228430)

Yes and no. They also dragged their feet on high-throughput Ka-band spacecraft with smaller spot beams. ViaSat built and launched ViaSat-1 while SES was still ordering satellites designed around analog video broadcast.

In the terrestrial real-estate analogy, this seems to me like missing out on potential returns because you built the wrong type of building on the land you own.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by breckenedge on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @03:10PM (#40227868)

If space-based telecom moves from GEO to LEO, then there’s no reason for GEO telecoms to exist anymore.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by Gare on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @03:44PM (#40228381)

Satellite TV is probably not going away anytime soon.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by simfree on Thursday May 02, 2024 @02:07AM (#40233184)

Dish and DirecTV are rapidly bleeding customers, the latter is not planning to launch any new birds for this dying business. It might only be a decade before this industry consolidates further into the remaining satellites, with some large providers going extinct entirely.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by MichaelZuo on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @03:29PM (#40228160)

The real estate would still be worth quite a bit, so even in the worst case they will just move on to be literal real estate holding companies.

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Re:Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces ... by panick21_ on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @04:05PM (#40228657)

That just saying that 'in this massive growth market, we are totally ok with losing the waste majority of market share until we are mostly irrelevant'.

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