Speaking virtually at the LEO Digital Forum last Tuesday, Shotwell reiterated SpaceX’s plans to — at least initially — focus Starlink on providing internet broadband to rural customers.
Speaking of that $99 a month service price, Shotwell reassured customers that despite concerns that have been raised regarding Starlink’s ability to sustain 100 megabits per second in download bandwidth to all of its customers, the company has no plans to charge higher prices to faster “tiers” of service so as to ration its bandwidth supply.
That being said, calculating Starlink’s potential revenue contribution to SpaceX isn’t quite as simple as multiplying $99 a month times 12 months a year times 60 million people.
If Starlink can deliver on its promise to provide 100 Mb/s speeds to all comers, at a $99 monthly price tag, its service should at the very least be competitive with alternative providers on a dollars-per-megabit basis.
What’s more, SpaceX says Starlink aims to grow its download speeds well past 100 Mb/s, to 1 gigabit per second, or even 10 Gb/s eventually.
Assuming each Starlink satellite supports a maximum download bandwidth of 23 Gb/s, providing 10 Gb/s service to customers would mean that each satellite in orbit over the U.S.
Given the obvious-ness, I can only imagine that Musk already has a solution in mind — upgraded Starlink satellites boasting vastly expanded bandwidth, for example.