😾 Oskar Is Starlink only made to broaden customer base for Internet-based services across the scale, world? Streaming, sales, data. If yes, how much is an untapped Internet economy worth to make it all viable?

☕ David Antoine Up to 60 or 65 degrees north/south I think. Initially. There is probably a big potential, huge part of land aren't covered yet or are badly provided. It will probably also encounter resistance from local/national providers. Here in Belgium I wouldn't be surprised if Starlink terminals aren't allowed to be sold or satellites not allowed to use ground relays. Though it seems difficult to prohibit that, the country is small. Will be interesting to see how it will pan out...

😾 Oskar I work fine with 3G in sparsely populated (by people and cell phone towers) area in Poland. I just can't stream video from services like netflix/hbo, beyond that, i get 1-2mb/s download which is... enough. I just wonder how big of a pivot Starlink have as a backup if this doesn't pan out.

☕ David Antoine That's a good question. And it's risky for them for sure. The key aspect I think is the simplicity of "nstallation". Obviously. And they're already marketing it. I don't remember the speeds but they are pretty good any latency hovers around fiber optics values. I don't know if it will be enough. At least they use their own rocket to build that, which limits the costs. At worst, they will be used by the milatry, the US Army as sign a three year agreement to access the network.

😾 Oskar Pivoting to military sounds more like a feature than fail safe mechanism :) I understand business perspective of 2nd order effects (being an industry leader) of expanding space industry and profits coming from that, but can't shake the feeling that Starlink is by design non-civilian, even if sold as. Then again, it's service for government contract can be as silly as form of subsidy and not otherwise malefic. Hence thinking about $ value of connected user.

☕ David Antoine Interesting, never thought about it as being a non civilian project. Could explain how fast the US army jumped on it. It is sure that its benefits are probably less evident than the European Galileo for example. Then again the latter is more a multi-governemental strategic program to be less dependent on the GPS than almost purely private. UK half a billion investment in Oneweb is maybe more of a fail safe example. I was surprised by it. I wonder what's the deal with that.