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Apparently a lot of people have signed up to Elon Musk's internet service provider:
SpaceX has announced that its internet service provider Starlink now has over 1 million active subscribers. It seems CEO Elon Musk's ongoing Twitter trash fire didn't stop enough people from signing up to his ISP to hold it back from this milestone.
[...] Though no doubt intended to sound impressive, Starlink's significant subscriber count may not be great news for its existing customers. According to a September report by Ookla, Starlink's median download speeds have dropped year-on-year since 2021's second quarter in every country the internet speed measurement company tracks. (Note: Ookla and Mashable are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)
[...] SpaceX also announced in August that it was partnering with T-Mobile to allow customers' mobile phones to connect directly with Starlink satellites, with beta testing to run in late 2023. This will potentially add even more people to Starlink's user base.
The company is likely aware of Starlink's flagging speeds, and appears to have taken steps to mitigate both use and expectation. In the ISP's new fair use policy introduced in November, SpaceX states that customers who exceed certain data limits during their monthly billing cycle will now have their internet speed throttled — that is, deliberately slowed down. Users will then have to pay extra to get their speeds back up.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Friday December 23, @06:32PM (10 children)
Really? I couldn't work for the man myself 'cos I think the expectations he has of his staff are abusive. But if you think he is just a salesman, you are missing the spectacular success of some of his ventures.
Tesla has changed the entire motor industry. Yes, it was probably going to change anyway, but not as quickly. Tesla's success is all down to Musk.
SpaceX is the most successful rocket company in history: it's launch cadence is astonishingly high and it's cost to orbit is pretty low. If Starship and SuperHeavy become a success, the cost to orbit will drop even further. SpaceX's success is all down to Musk.
Starlink: well we'll have to see.
Yes, he can be a jerk. And yes, some people revere the man as some sort of messianic saviour which is ridiculous. But his success is real and well-earned.
As for Twitter: if it fails he may well have done the world a service. No single company, or individual, should be responsible for something that has the potential to be critical infrastructure.
__
The Major
(Score: 2) by tizan on Friday December 23, @07:03PM (9 children)
Let's be fair SpaceX is due to massive subsidies from the Govt.
Other startups are going for the same tech...SpaceX does not have super human...just lucky to get picked by NASA at the right time.
Similarly startlink will be succesful if they manage to get enough govt entities, military, schools etc t get into it and subsidies it because they depend on it (remember iridium satellite cellular (make the military depend on it then they pay taxpayers money to keep it running)......otherwise just as a full private market ...i don't see it compete with 5G, fibre, fiber+WISP etc....
Your opinion is as good as mine....that is my interpretation of success in space "private" industry
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 23, @08:55PM
If you want to throw the subsidy card at SpaceX... they developed Falcon 9 and Heavy for low billions. Falcon Heavy is a relatively minor modification of Falcon 9, and cost over $500 million to develop [wikipedia.org], with no direct government funding. If you want to argue that their NASA and Air Force contracts were the funding, apply the rules to everyone. Boeing/ULA and friends have raked in many tens of billions of dollars in the space domain specifically, turned out overpriced crap like the Senate Launch System, and are struggling to compete with Falcon 9 [teslarati.com]. By the time they do, they will be crushed by Starship.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23, @11:42PM (7 children)
Payment for services is now a subsidy? Or maybe you're of the school that anytime the government pays for something it's a subsidy? You want to see real subsidies just look at what the traditional providers are getting paid for far less than what SpaceX delivers. This megalomaniac, lying salesman delivers a lot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24, @02:10PM (6 children)
What about Tesla? He bought that company and some argue essentially applied an Apple rounded corners style and upsold it as luxury to his SpaceX fanbase, while thriving on selling environmental credits to other car companies. It will be interesting to see how they are going to do now that those credits are going away, and whether they will ever make much money on selling vehicles themselves.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24, @05:04PM (5 children)
Sorry that's moving the goalposts. Tesla is a different company. I grant Tesla received a lot in subsidies, but that's irrelevant to SpaceX's situation. I think what's particularly obnoxious about the claim of SpaceX subsidies is that the SLS people have received almost 20 billion USD for a three ring circus while SpaceX has been launching a bunch of NASA missions for years for substantially less. And NASA is a very particular customer. Their missions are naturally higher cost.
NASA needs to pay someone in order to get NASA stuff in space and do their job. They won't be getting that from SLS.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 24, @09:07PM (4 children)
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/01/nasa-auditor-warns-congress-artemis-missions-sls-rocket-billions-over-budget.html [cnbc.com]
https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion [planetary.org]
$40-50 billion, going on $93 billion by 2025.
It's plausible that the SLS becomes known as the $20 billion per launch rocket after it's all over. And that's being generous.
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(Score: 2) by tizan on Wednesday December 28, @12:21AM (3 children)
Whatever your point...you are comparing absorbing development costs of a few launches to the moo/beyond to 1000's of launches to Low earth orbit. Its like comparing the price of mining dump trucks to F-150's ...both are trucks but the comparison stops there !
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28, @03:51AM (2 children)
Actually the comparison goes really, really far here. All that money spent on SLS could be buying a lot of Falcon 9 launches and getting that Moon/beyond stuff done now rather than a few decades from now, maybe.
The dump truck analogy is that you can buy and run those F-150s and get the job done now. Or you could make your own mining dump truck, and if you get it running, do a very few things with the dump truck because you can't afford to run it very often. Vastly less output with a huge delay, and that's if you can pull it off - which NASA hasn't done since 1980!
(Score: 2) by tizan on Thursday December 29, @05:57PM (1 child)
Indeed why wait 9 month for a baby for 1 mother when 9 mothers can do it in 1 month. To hell with physics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 30, @12:43AM
Indeed. We could wait instead for NASA's baby to do it in a decade or two maybe rather than a few dozen or few hundred Falcons doing it now in 9 months. This is a great way to turn a few mythical man-months into a few mythical man-decades.