Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
They announced they are not launching any more v1s, and they cannot launch v2s on current hardware.
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
They also said that v2 has 5x more weight, and 10x more "capacity". Not sure what capacity is, and why falcon 9 isn't enough for something that's giving them 2x more "capacity" per unit mass.
Capacity is supposed to mean something like bits per second, although of course there are lots of other numbers that are important. One wonders who they have farmed out the packet handling to. Shoveling a commercial router on there would probably be a mistake, because of the "harsh" orbital environment, the restricted power budget, and the extremely variable routing environment.
Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
