Starlink’s “subsequent-period” user terminal will cost plenty much less, Musk says

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talked about his company’s Starlink division is making an strive to chop aid the cost of its user terminal from $500 to as dinky as $250. Starlink has been charging $99 a month for Web service finally of its beta segment, plus $500 up entrance for the user terminal/satellite dish, and it’s shedding money on the sale of every and each dish.

“We are shedding money on that terminal factual now. That terminal prices us extra than $1,000,” Musk talked about the day old to this finally of a Cell World Congress Q&A session (watch a YouTube video posted by CNET). “We clearly are subsidizing the cost of the terminal. We are working on subsequent-period terminals that present the identical stage of functionality, roughly the identical stage of functionality, but cost plenty much less.”

Musk renowned that “promoting terminals for half attach is no longer plentiful compelling” on condition that SpaceX is planning for millions of Starlink clients. “Over time, we would possibly lift to chop aid the terminal cost from $500 to, I device no longer know, $300 or $250, or one thing treasure that.”

Musk did no longer present any say timeline for lowering the terminal attach. Confidently, the next terminal can be extra tolerant of heat. As we no longer too long ago reported, primarily the most modern Starlink dishes crawl into “thermal shutdown” after they hit 122° Fahrenheit, a limit that precipitated one Arizona customer to lose Web service for seven hours and has precipitated shorter outages for diverse of us.

Starlink hits “strategically well-known” quantity of customers

Musk rehashed some Starlink plans that dangle been already made public, such because the corporate’s expectation that this would push latency under 20 ms. He furthermore gave an update on primarily the most modern quantity of customers and the amount of customers expected within the next year. “We no longer too long ago handed the strategically well-known quantity of 69,420 interesting customers,” Musk talked about. “We are on our manner to having about a hundred thousand customers, perhaps over 500,000 customers, within 12 months.”

Starlink would possibly at final dangle about 1,000,000 home-Web clients in the US. It has a pending application asking the Federal Communications Rate to let it deploy up to five million user terminals in the US, up from its most modern authorization of 1 million terminals.

Starlink is “operational now in about 12 worldwide locations, and extra [are] being added every month,” Musk talked about. So a ways, Starlink has over 1,500 low-Earth-orbit satellites offering data service able to a mixed 30Tbps, he talked about. “Beginning in August, we would possibly also aloof dangle global connectivity in every single set aside besides the poles,” Musk talked about.

Starlink no alternative for fiber

Musk has all but again and all but again talked about he does no longer take into story Starlink as a alternative for instant wireline Web service. “You would possibly deem Starlink as filling in the gaps between 5G and fiber, and surely getting to the hardest, most subtle-to-attain 3 p.c, perhaps 5 p.c [of Internet users,” he said yesterday. “It quite nicely complements fiber and 5G.”

SpaceX tells users to expect “brief periods of no connectivity at all” during the beta period. Those outages will presumably become less frequent as more satellites are launched and the service enters non-beta commercial availability, though the need for a line-of-sight connection to satellites will continue to make Starlink less reliable than fiber cables.

Musk touted Starlink’s phase-array technology, saying, “To the best of our knowledge, it is the most advanced phase-array system in the world, so that’s pretty cool.” Because of the phase-array antenna technology on the satellites and ground-based terminals, “you can switch from one satellite that’s moving rapidly overhead to another one and do so at the microsecond level,” Musk said. “You can’t tell as the system is switching over from one satellite to another. There’s no change in latency or jitter from one satellite to another, and a single satellite can illuminate many different user cell spots on the ground.”

Still, Starlink can’t provide enough capacity to serve a huge number of customers in high-density areas. Musk has stated that several times, and he said again yesterday, “We’re well-suited to low- and medium-density areas but not high-density areas. In high-density areas, we’ll be able to serve a limited number of customers.”

Musk also recently said that, while Starlink should be able to provide service to all 500,000 people who ordered it, getting to several million users will be “more of a challenge.” Musk didn’t say yesterday when Starlink will exit beta, though SpaceX has said it will deliver on preorders starting in the second half of 2021.

Cell carriers to use Starlink for backhaul

Starlink will both provide broadband access to users directly and sell network capacity to cellular carriers. Musk said that Starlink has “two quite significant partnerships with major-country telcos that I’d like to be able to announce now, but we defer to our partners to make any announcement” and is “in discussion with a number of other telcos.” Starlink is attractive to carriers in rural areas where they “might have 5G towers but have trouble with backhaul,” he said, adding that Starlink “can be a very cost-effective way of doing data backhaul.”

Similar to fiber and cable ISPs, Starlink plans to have direct connections to “major server centers,” Musk said. “If someone is using YouTube or Netflix, Google search or Xbox, whatever the case may be, the data flows in the shortest possible [path], thus minimizing latency and jitter,” he talked about. “Even supposing spacious chunks of the Web crawl down, then you without a doubt proceed to dangle connectivity.”

Musk talked about he expects SpaceX to invest $5 billion to $10 billion in Starlink sooner than it reaches a “fully obvious cash crawl with the circulate.” Over a longer time frame, the SpaceX funding would possibly be $20 billion or $30 billion, he talked about.

“We will dangle to defend investing a plentiful deal after [reaching a profitable state] in squawk to no longer be made beside the purpose by continued improvements in mobile” and diverse satellite programs, he talked about. Starlink has by a ways primarily the most low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites deployed, but this would face competition from OneWeb and Amazon.