I really wonder if anyone is going to be able to catch up to SpaceX anytime soon. Kuiper seems dead in the water, the legacy operators seem unwilling to expand into LEO constellations.
I think the potential comptetitors in this business (low latency satellite internet megaconstellation) missed their opportunity.
Starship is very close to being able to put next gen Starlink satellites into orbit ("very close" as in most likely within a year or so). Once that happens, it's over, there will not be competition for at least a decade. Before Bezos and others (and/or EU/China) build their own Starship copies (and if you've seen recent EU/China concepts, you can't call it anything else...), it's going to be the 2030s.
Not to mention that the existing Starlink fleet is about to be old technology. The larger satellites launched by Starship is projected to dwarf the terminal speed available now (gigabit+ downlinks to consumer dishes).
Not sure if they are dead in the water or not. However, they have until July 30, 2026 to deploy half of their fleet or they lose the FCC granted frequencies. The fleet is 3232 satellites.
So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with that. In reality, I think SpaceX will end up launching a lot more than that.
Unless FCC is willing to be lenient, 50% of the satellites will be hard to accomplish by the deadline.
The quick maths indicates that to achieve this, they’d have to launch 22.5 satellites per week every week for the next 18 months until that deadline. SpaceX seems to be launching at nearly twice that rate, having launched [1565 satellites](https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/30/live-coverage-spacex-t....) in the first 10 months of this year.
> I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.
Are you living in a different world that me?
NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range.
That's why I said "if all the space providers work together". That obviously includes SpaceX - they would be doing the heavy lifting here (mind pun intended).
> NO company or Government on Earth
Not that it's a possibility for Kuiper, but China had 67 launches in 2023.
I doubt that very much. Gwynne Shotwell stated multiple times that they will work with whoever. In addition, SpaceX is already contracted for 3 launches of Kuiper.
I think Starlink has caused rural fiber deployments to accelerate because a friend's property in rural Oregon just got fiber, but the challenge remains: after you get fiber to the corner of your 22 acre lot, how do you cover the rest of the 21 acres? With fiber and using wifi as your backhaul you have to get a chain a bunch of nodes to get Internet to each building/area you want wifi. Starlink (business) lets you just stick a starlink mini dish in each place without having to worry about all that.
Centurylink ran fiber down the nearest highway to my rural Oregon property a couple of months before Starlink became available. AFAIK the timing was more coincidence than anything, but you're entirely right about the logistics of fiber being non-trivial. As usual, last mile is the hardest part. Even with fiber at the highway, the only service Centurylink would offer us was 10Mbps DSL. I bet they would have tun fiver to my house for $$$$$, but Starlink is plenty fast and it would almost certainly take a decade or more to recoup the one-time costs of getting fiber installed all the way to my house.
that solution isn't without issues. specifically, you have to climb trees and run power or do solar, and then if there's a heavy storm you can have issues. those aren't insurmountable problems but being able to get Internet anywhere there's liner of sight to the sky is easier (or harder!) depending on the terrain.
Climbing one tree to get Starlink to see the sky is less work then having to climb multiple trees to align a dish and a repeater so it's entirely terrain dependent so all we can say in the general case is we have to take a look at your land/situation before saying which would be preferable to you.
You are right for on-grid systems. If you can get power from the grid, it is easy to get fiber. I have friends working remotely from very rural zones in Brazil, and they got fiber for a lower price than it was for buying up the transformers/posts to route power to their farms.
But, there are still niche use cases, like ships and planes, that would pay a premium for fast LEO satellite connections. For people I know who live on islands, going from barely being able to use WhatsApp to entirely using the internet (YouTube / Netflix) is game-changing.
