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Elon Musk says SpaceX is ready to deploy its private rocket company to spend $ 30 billion Starlink, its satellite Internet network which now has 70,000 users in 12 countries.
Musk said Starlink is on track to offer global coverage – “except at all poles” – by August and having half a million users “within 12 months.”
SpaceX has 1,500 low-orbit satellites for Starlink, which currently provides broadband Internet service, a service that fills geographic gaps between terrestrial fiber connections and 5G-covered areas, Musk said. The full-capacity service will have 12,000 satellites.
“It’s very much for sparsely populated regions,” Musk said in a video interview from California for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “We’re really getting to places in the world – the hardest part is getting to 3 percent, maybe 5 percent.”
The new $ 30 billion investment mentioned by Musk was new and is larger than the previous forecast, although it is not clear that this projection can be directly compared to previous estimates. Musk said it will change whether the development of the Falcon 9 rocket is included.
In a 2018 TED Talk, Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said the deployment of 12,000 satellites would cost “about $ 10 billion or more”.
Musk said SpaceX expects to invest between $ 5 billion and $ 10 billion in Starlink before the cash flow is positive, and has estimated costs of between $ 20 billion and $ 30 billion overall. “It’s a lot, basically,” he said.
Musk did not comment on Starlink’s revenue, but predicted that in the past it could generate $ 2025 million in annual revenue.
Musk acknowledged that all first attempts to provide broadband services based on constellations, since the 1990s, have failed. He joked that a few years ago his goal was to avoid failure.
The cost of a Starlink “terminal” or satellite dish is $ 499, plus a monthly subscription of $ 99. Musk said the hardware costs customers twice as much as it charges.
The billionaire entrepreneur also said that Starlink has signed two major telecommunications partnerships, but declined to give a name.
In December, the Starlink project was awarded nearly $ 900 million in U.S. federal funding to support rural broadband connections. The prize was about one-tenth of the $ 9.2 billion auction conducted by the Federal Communications Commission and will be distributed over a decade each month.
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