Over 250000 SpaceX Starlink Terminals

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Elon Musk tweeted that there are over 250,000 Starlink Terminals which means that number of provisioned users.

In August, 2021, SpaceX had connected over 90,000 Starlink customers and was adding 20,000 users per month. The growth rate was about 30% per month. SpaceX added 160,000 users in six months. This is about 26,000 users per month.

SpaceX had over half a million orders/deposits globally. Elon Musk says SpaceX could add that many users by summer 2022. In the next three months, SpaceX could add 80,000 users per month.

SpaceX is charging $99/month for beta users. SpaceX will be making about $50 million per month in the summer of 2022. In February, SpaceX introduced Starlink Premium for $500 per month. It offers speeds between 150 and 500Mbps with 20 to 40 milliseconds of latency, up from 50 to 250Mbps with the same latency. Upload speeds are up from 10 to 20Mbps on the standard plan to 20 to 40Mbps on Premium. The doubled performance costs five times more. There are also guarantees of preferential service. If there is congested traffic then Premium customers will get service.

SpaceX should have over one million users and fifty thousand Premium customers by the end of 2022. This would be about $1.4 to 1.5 billion per year in revenue.

Starlink has the lowest latency of any communication system over long distances (over 3000 miles). This lower latency is a result of physics that light travels faster in a vacuum than in glass.

In 2017, SpaceX had an internal plan for $30 billion in internet service revenue by 2025 with operating profit margins in excess of 60%. This would be for a complete 12,000 satellite configuration. This would mean 25 global million users at $99 per month. The combined bandwidth of all these satellites won’t support more than 2.8 million users utilizing the service at advertised minimum rates of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of download speed. The average U.S. broadband subscriber uses 600 GB – 700 GB of data per month by the end of 2021. This is about 15 minutes of full high-speed 100 Mbps data usage.

Given 12,000 satellites, the US will have access to 1.96%*12,000 = 235 satellites at any given time. Bandwidth per Starlink satellite is about 20-80 gbps. The US will have access to 235 * 50 gbps = 12 tbps

There are 19 million people in the US that lack access to broadband, and several million more that barely meet the broadband definition. There is typically a 20 to 1 to 50 to 1 aggregation rate. This means that companies like Comcast can oversubscribe with the knowledge that most people are not using the system at any one time and are not using the full bandwidth at any time.

20X multiple for the aggregated bandwidth.

240 aggregated tbps / 100 mbps = 2.4 million users in the USA.

50X multiple for the aggregated bandwidth.
600 aggregated tbps / 100 mbps = 6 million users in the USA.

SpaceX should have all 12000 satellites deployed by the end of 2023 or in 2024.

Generation two satellites will be five times bigger and have more bandwidth and there will be 30,000 satellites. This will be about 12 times the capacity of the generation 1. This would be able to generate about $360 billion in global revenue.

SOURCES- Elon Musk, SpaceX, Starlink, Twitter
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

27 thoughts on “Over 250000 SpaceX Starlink Terminals”

  2. All men make mistakes, including Elon. He may yet commit a great blunder.

    Most of the whining about the satellites affecting astronomers should be easily fixed using AI and algorithms to removethe satellite reflections from the recorded pictures and videos. If someone asked Elon nicely, I bet Elon would gladly fund it…

  4. The *right* question is the one you wish you had asked! In this case, from the context, if Musk does NOT ask the question, and is chauvinistically assuming the answer to be Mars, without realizing he is even making an assumption, chauvinistically, he will continue to get it wrong. O'Neill's question is actually a family of questions, all starting with "Is the surface of a planet the right place for" and fill in your task. In this comment chain, the first was about money, but the later was about Musk motive, preserving humans, even more than money. If you understand O'Neill and micr0g locations, it is clear what the answer is. But first, you have to ask the question. Most have never heard it, or thot of it.

  6. Distinct shortage of mansions and infinity pools in Boca Chica, you may notice. He's got a micro-home there that he sleeps in, and that's about it, one step above a pop up trailer.

    Some people value posh, and some people value other things. Like colonizing Mars.

  7. I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's wishful thinking based on his excellent past salesmanship.

    His new found aversion to mansions in ca was entirely related to his tax domicile and the resulting savings of a couple billion in taxes.

  8. …That does not exclude the Musk from being a man of great blunders. Their time has not come yet, that's all. His success in achieving relatively modest goals technically are propelling him to pursue goals that are far more difficult to achieve, in the field of AI and man machine interface in particular. Starlink, should be fully evaluated for what it is regardless of who is behind it!

  9. …And not having the natural dark and busy skies is a high price with consequences not fully known yet for getting high speed internet everywhere. It is not only about professional astronomers as I have pointed out and you choose to ignore. We know very little about the effect of dark skies and starlight on life on this planet. Assuming without knowing can be dangerously stupid when making determinations Mind you that these internet needs are going to continue grow briskly one way or the other. There are other ways to achieve this, other compromises can be made. Not everything that can be done should be done. Limited resources are used cautiously.

  10. I don't think I'm going to agree that astronomers get such priority that they get to render orbital space a preserve. They need to get used to the fact that the sky is going to be occupied, crowded even, and accept that much, much cheaper access to space will let them afford placing their telescopes out beyond the obstructions.

    There will be reasonable accommodations to reduce specular reflections, but they're going to lose that dark sky on Earth, because they're not the only people who have uses for that space.

  11. It costs money to raise other space objects up and Limit launches time and place window especially now when they are about to grow exponentially. We will always need having telescopes on earth, even for hobby sky watching, And yes, we need to have an unobstructed view of the stars outside of the city just like many slots of earth should be kept undeveloped. In other words, near earth space is a limited piece of real estate that should be used sparingly.

  12. I'm somewhat concerned (Half jokingly, but only half.) about the emphasis on it being a "city". High population densities are really not good for human flourishing, and while centralization promotes efficiency, at the same time it renders systems vulnerable to catastrophic failures, and provides control points that promote authoritarian rule.

    All those graphics portray a colony that is much more centralized and resource intensive than is ideal if the goal is a free society, achieved at minimum cost.

  13. A few things to note:

    In the real world, Starlink will add to internet capacity, probably won't poach too many existing customers from existing ISPs. But AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have reasons to be worried. Musk's companies iterate at an astounding pace. I hope the cable companies will be forced to compete on service and price. (A man can always dream).

    Elon Musk has many enemies, because he doesn't bow down to others. Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Politicians, Legacy Car companies, Boeing, Lockheed, etc. see Elon as a threat to their little fiefdoms/worldviews. Not just in the US, but globally.

    I can't/couldn't stand Gates nor Jobs nor Buffet nor Bezos nor Zuckerberg. They have no interest in open standards or fair playing fields, all while demanding more and more government subsidies/contracts. No mention of that from all the Musk haters on here.

    Elon Musk does use government money, a great deal of it. But he is willing to share his technology and believes in open standards. He truly believes everyone needs to pitch in for environmental/survival reasons. I think climate change/catastrophe is way overblown and hyped, but I do believe in conservation and good stewardship of our planet. (Unfortunately, urban/suburban kids are easily duped by claims of catastrophe. They are never taught what 'scarcity' or 'net zero' means for the poor people in the world.)

    God bless Musk for his leadership. What would the state of electric cars and space business be without him?

  15. The article correctly identifies the actual problem, and then ignores it: "The Hubble orbits at 535 km" "NASA said it has approximately 14 Earth-observing missions and that SpaceX's planned altitudes for the 30,000 satellites are lower than most of the space vehicles used in those missions." "Next, NASA noted that it "uses wide-field ground-based telescopes to survey for asteroids that could potentially impact the Earth and cause harm""

    Major telescopes are typically sited in remote locations, not urban centers, for a reason. LEO is no longer a remote location, astronomers should stop expecting to be able to treat it as one.

    Hubble can, relatively cheaply once Starship is operating, be boosted into a higher orbit. Future orbital telescopes should be placed at least in GEO, or perhaps one of the Lagrange points. Any telescope for looking for Earth impacting asteroids should be in an orbit substantially Sunwards of Earth, not ON Earth, where it can't see bodies that spend most of their time closer to the Sun.

    Astronomers need to adapt, not demand that orbital space be kept empty for their convenience.

  16. Because he wants to, and he's wealthy. Sure, he'll take NASA's money if it's available, but it if isn't, and he can afford Mars, why wouldn't he go to Mars? He's got no apparent interest in mansions and infinity pools.

  17. *Everybody* keeps talking about Mars, Mars Mars. That is why. Not really thot out. Have to ask the right question. "Is the surface of a planet the right place to make money?"

  19. There are almost infinite possibilities for financing things in Space directly, because they make money. Such as Starlink. Many of which will help solve the chauvinistically conceived "multiplanetary" opportunity, which is actually, without the unconsciously held and false planet assumption, better solved by "multihabitats", as all the planets together are so tiny, including Earth even.

  20. Same sort of thing between Lunar Solar Power and GEO Solar Power Sats. If you eliminate junk, light pollution, construction and station keeping from orbit, as LSP does, it is a hard to measure but real advantage. It is hard to measure because of the scale aspect, so huge is 20-200 TWe. Criswell LSP.

  21. Meantime worries about the the space environmental disaster that starlink is are growing globally. There are by the way more environmental friendly alternatives to it. By the way, customer satisfaction from the program approaches zero and user growth is dropping.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/nasa-says-starlink-gen2-may-cause-problems-for-hubble-and-asteroid-detection/

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/starlink-customers-spacexs-customer-non-100000967.html

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/spacexs-starlink-user-growth-dropped-131205415.html

  22. He nor anyone else going will be really government-free for a long time, as long as they live and depend on Earth's resources and people, they will have to answer to a government.

    But the mission skeleton and basic hardware will come from their work. Fed by NASA's expertise and money, true, but only made possible because they are dragging it forward.

    And when it is really going, it will become self funded. The kickstart of the Mars city, I mean.

    If it's successful or not is another matter.

  23. Good, a lot of the dreams to come rest on the assumption this pans out.

    When they asked Musk a few years back how he was to finance his rockets and Mars city dream, he jokingly replied that stealing underpants.

    Well, here they are.

  25. They will get money by the truckload if it pans out as they expect, also changing what people think a livable, properly connected place is.

    And they will use it to make humanity multiplanetary, instead of more boring new super-rich mansions or a yatch.

    Well, Elon Musk will kinda make himself a mansion on Mars and his yatchs will be interplanetary.

    Works for me and for humanity's future at large, despite the many offended it won't be the government doing it.

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