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SpaceX projected 20 million Starlink users by 2022—it ended up with 1 million

HairyLeg

ULTIMATE Member
Paywalled: Wall Street Journal


Arstechnica Report


Once again Space Karen guilty of over promising and under delivering...
 
It's a bit of a strange product because I think it should be priced much higher than it is but for a higher quality result - a CPE with rack mounting options for connecting really remote branch offices, a vehicle-specific SKU that runs off 24v power etc. Instead you've ended up with something that costs a fortune to operate being positioned as an alternative broadband option with all the price sensitivities that go along with that, or you have Reddit users hammering the service 24x7 simply because they can.

The £250/month pitch that is being made now for on-vehicle use and maritime is probably where its market lies, and the price point gets people onto leased lines if they're actually an option, and the price sensitive onto cellular.

Ultimately you have a service that would stop working if it hit the subscriber volumes required to get the revenue figures that SpaceX were targeting, and nobody seemed to notice.
 
It's a bit of a strange product because I think it should be priced much higher than it is but for a higher quality result - a CPE with rack mounting options for connecting really remote branch offices, a vehicle-specific SKU that runs off 24v power etc.
Clearly SpaceX's intial targets were well wide of the mark, currently there isn't a market of 20 million customers for the product at the current price level, assuming there are zero problems with scalability/bandwidth/etc

The £250/month pitch that is being made now for on-vehicle use and maritime is probably where its market lies,
Possibly, but won't have any impact on the goal of Starlink being a 20 million customer product. Increasing the cost and providing even more niche products does nothing to increase the mass appeal and meet the goal they set for investors.

Technically an incredible product with potential but without significant changes to pricing (primarily) it feels like SpaceX are going to blow the advantage they have or had before the Kuiper/Oneweb/Telesat + others bums rush the market.
 
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They're currently at around 1.5 - 1.6 million customers. But to be fair, the original projections were all made based on wrongful assumptions about where the market would be in the future. In reality, Starlink launched around a Pandemic, and we're now in a dire cost-of-living crisis, which makes premium products even harder to sell.

I've long argued that Starlink needs a budget option to be viable for the wider mass market, but that's a tough thing to do for LEO satellite platforms.
 
They're currently at around 1.5 - 1.6 million customers
Have you got a source for that figure? I've seen it posted multiple times around the interwebs but never with data to back up the claim. Kind of why this report in the WSJ is interesting as it's one of the first credible outlets to report *any* user numbers.

Even the 1 million customers at the end of 2022 seems like a stretch given the preceding pandemic and lack of availability of electronic components throughout 2021-2022. Many manufacturers weren't able to ship any product or had to remove components (Mikrotik is a good example not being able to source USB controller chips on their routers through 2021 & 2022)

SpaceX manufacturing & shipping approximately 2500 units per day, seven days a week from March 2021 to December 2022 is just not credible..
 
It's from Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX VP of Starlink. But you could estimate it at that too by looking at their growth figures through 2021 - 2022, and you'd arrive at a similar place.
 
Link please..

As I wrote the first 3rd party claim about user numbers came from a fairly credible source of The WSJ (not withstanding the framing of the article is a certainly odd) every other claim has been from Musk or others associated with SpaceX.

For example: March 2022 SpaceX were claiming 250k users (source Hoefeller/SpaceX)

Which does seem credible given a typical semi auto production line ramp up can easily take 4-6 months to start producing output with acceptable reject rates.

SpaceX then put an additional 750k users into service from April '22 through December '22 (9 months including 2 product redesigns) and then another 600k in the first 6 months of 2023. And as you mention in your first reply all of this coming out of a global pandemic with a shortage of electronic components and non functioning logistics.

As an ex-user (mid-April 2021 to December 2022) I'm highly sceptical because tech support, product & spares availability, customer comms, service reliability were all atrocious thoughout..
 
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Link please..
I mean you could use a search engine. e.g.

There's plenty of news around them over the last few days, due to being none-loss making.

The company last provided an update on its global Starlink user base in May, when it said it had about 1.5 million customers. Hofeller did not specify what that total is now but said Starlink is “well over” that 1.5 million mark. The figure includes both consumer and enterprise customers around the world, which Hofeller said the service aims to “grow to hopefully millions and millions.”

Emphasis mine.

I mean you also didn't link sources in your rebuttal so...
 
I mean you could use a search engine. e.g.

There's plenty of news around them over the last few days, due to being none-loss making.



Emphasis mine.

I mean you also didn't link sources in your rebuttal so...
Yes but that's just CNBC riffing on the WSJ article.

The core information of that page is essentially just two sentences bulked out to a a complete page. There is nothing new to report..

Which is kinda my point, every time we read accounts of the number of active Starlink users it's via 2nd or 3rd hand reports of he said/she said at some conference or publicity gathering and always from sales & marketing execs... Marketing are always truthful, right it's their job ;)
 
Even only 2 million customers, paying £62.50 per month (ex VAT), is still £1.5bn per year turnover.

Whilst I don't doubt all those satellite launches are expensive, SpaceX gets them at cost, as well as using them as a testbed / technology demonstrator for their launch platform.

There is still a ton of growth room, both in developed countries (underserved rural users with deep pockets) and in developing countries (competition against much more expensive geostationary satellites)
 
What I wonder is, are they profitable? I bet it's not.
 
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There was a claim Elmo was auditioning to be the next James Bond villain..

Screenshot_20231008_201526.webp
 
Technically an incredible product with potential but without significant changes to pricing (primarily) it feels like SpaceX are going to blow the advantage they have or had before the Kuiper/Oneweb/Telesat + others bums rush the market.
Not sure they were ever going to compete with the likes of Oneweb - that still looks firmly like a high end, high price product.

Still the original starlink projected volumes were hugely optimistic. It’s a niche product.
 
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