SpaceX Selling Starlink at Costco Japan as the Starlink Dish Gigafactory Nears Completion

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Get ready for millions of Starlink dishes built and sold every month. SpaceX is completing a 521,000 square foot Starlink Ground equipment/dish factory. The factory has the area of three Costcos which average about 180,000 square feet. SpaceX is currently making 150,000 Starlink dishes each month.

Starlink has over 4000 Starlink satellites in space and they can support twenty million customers around the world with those satellites. Currently, most of the nearly 2 million SpaceX Starlink customers are in the USA which only has 4% of the satellites overhead at any moment.

SpaceX is starting to sell Starlink dishes in Costco Japan. This is key to SpaceX growth, they must make millions of dishes and sell them around the world. 96% of the satellites are underused.

IF SpaceX made and sold one million dishes per month starting in November, 2023 then they would double the Starlink customers from 2 million to 4 million at the end 2023 and then have 16 million customers at the end of 2024.

12 thoughts on “SpaceX Selling Starlink at Costco Japan as the Starlink Dish Gigafactory Nears Completion”

  1. SpaceX needs to sell Starlink as Wi-Fi ground stations in underserved areas. The government or international charity organization can buy them and have them installed. The units could also be used for remote learning and remote government.

  2. If you live at my latitude, 35 degrees you need a large treeless area to the north, NE, and NW, or something really high to put the antenna on. I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere the Starlink app would have approved of the yard, or roof. There are lots of tall trees in piedmont North Carolina.

  4. Just wait a few months and you may be able to make sattelite connection with your 4/5G phone directly through your provider (Vodafone, verizon, MTN, and many others).

    ASTS is going to dominate sattelite Internet because the technology is so much better than starlink, no dish or separate subscription required, just opt in with a telco provider.

    • Hm.., A few months? They only seem to have – correct me off I am wrong – tried downloading from a single experimental satellite. To get to global coverage or even just national coverage (USA), is probably a bit more than just a few months away, would you not think?

      • Hourly IoT level data transmission requires a minimum 24 sats according to both Lynk.Global and ASTS investor presentations, for D2D 4G data. Tiny data squirts at that, depending on the number of transmitters per cell. They would need to deploy a megaconstellation to get the 24 hour realtime coverage with substantial bandwidth to be equivalent to a terrestrial tower.

  5. Up front cost? Cost per month? Upload and download speeds? latency in milliseconds? Free help desk? If the price is not mentioned then I presume it is priceless. I cannot afford priceless products.

    • One answer that could be a lead story here by itself is that the price shown in the photo from Costco Japan is ¥36,500 which is almost exactly $250 US. That suggests SpaceX is cutting the price to buy the units in half when sold this way. This seems like an appropriate move with a big jump in production coming.

      In the US it might make sense for them to put deals like this in Costcos in underserved areas rather than nationally, to avoid excess demand on the system in some places. When Starship can start regularly launching the full Version 2 satellites, the system capacity should accommodate a lot more users in densely populated US areas.

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