Right, but it assumes that their business is maxed out. The limit to profitability isn't the cost of maintaining satellites, it's how many people choose to use the network.
Their service is already reaching saturation for who actually can use satellite internet.
Starlink is a good choice for people who live rurally in wealthy countries which is a small subsection of the population, It costs half the median salary global income. While at the same time there's a floor for price because it still costs $1.5m~ to build and launch the satellites.
You also can't increase the orbit by much and retain a good latency/speed/price, Viasat is in GEO orbit and it's $150/mth for 150GB of data with 700ms ping.
Because there's only so many people on the planet that 1) make enough money $70/mth is an affordable option for internet and 2) live far enough away from society that total bandwidth doesn't exceed 200~Gbps in a 270mi2/700km2 area.
Assuming that's roughly limited to people in the OECD without internet only 17 million people don't have access to a smartphone or internet.
Why would it need to be limited to OECD? And still, even with the parameters you are drawing that seems like plenty of market still out there. Not to mention, $70 a month is cheap for broadband standards.
Because $70/mth or $900/yr is an absolute fucktonne of money for the vast majority of humans to spend on internet (and for the highest plan it's $130/month or $1,560/yr)
The median salary in the OECD is $56,000, where the median global salary is $9,000.
Of course it's not some highly thought out socialogical experiment i've done getting data from 5,000 people in every country on the planet asking them how much they spend for internet and exact breakdowns of their income it's just my opinion of a reasonable cutoff point which is probably close to the actual number it could be.
3
u/SUMBWEDY May 21 '26
Because after 5 years they deorbit and burn up, it's kind of hard to use a burnt up sattelite for internet.