“European Starlink rival” is a bit far fetched when there’s merely rumours that they might be able to offer a similar service. But that’s the stock market for you.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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They have both GEO and LEO satellites. Not on the scale of Starlink (for LEO), but they do have a network.
I am not commenting on the nature of the stock market or anything like that. Just pointing out that they do have a working network, it's not 100% speculation (like you see with crypto schemes).
You're correct but their LEO constellation is over 10x smaller than Starlink, so they've still got a lot of catching up to do.
They are doing much better than other fabled starlink competitors though, like amazon kuiper which is still not a real thing after all this time.
They have one strong competitive advantage that Starlink will never have; they are not American.
By definition, you cannot trust an American service. Even if the people who run a given service are not degenerates, there are enough degenerates in the US that they could elect a degenerate who will fuck you over.
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It'll be interesting to see what the Canadian telesat LEO system will be capable of. They're supposed to be launching satellites next year and are using a higher orbit so will need much fewer satellites than starlink.
But sadly increased latency. Also don't hold your breath on Canada telecom anything, we have a history of being the worst at it.
I don't mind a bit more latency (should still be nicely below 100ms) but my use case is more related to mid-Atlantic mobile connectivity than remote region broadband.
Their planned implementation just seems much better than others with beam shaping, linked satellites and less than 200 satellites to maintain and replace.
Although you're not wrong about our telecom track record...
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If only I wasn't too chicken shit to start investing... I was looking at Eutelsats stocks earlier in the week. But it'd be my first steps on the market so decided against it.
I finally got brave enough to do it. Between August and January I had made over 800%.
Trump has ruined that for me. Oh well.
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Unpopular opinion: we don't need freaking internet from satellites, just get cat6 in every home and everyone is happy. I'm sure the cost would be lower then having to launch 999999.91 satellites to have similar speeds
You do if you're fighting a war against Putin and the ketamine troll is threatening to turn off your internet.
There are remote areas where cable won’t reach. For example, I need surveillance on a remote farm and I would love to get internet there.
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Now get rid of the home and the cable, how do you cover 99.9% of the earth? Nomads need satellite, and so do rural homes too far from an isp fiber/copper endpoint But yes, if starlink has it done, why double the satellites to do it again with a different name? Because it's easier to launch 1000 more satellites than dismantle the system that enables such feats.
Cat 6A caps out at like 330 ft. Also thats a ton of copper.
Fiber optic nonprofit utilities makes more sense in cities and in rural areas we should just subsidize cell phone data plans.
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Exactly! Amazon can ship it to you for like 10 bucks. Problem solved!
You need to plug it into something though. If you are on a boat, what are you going to plug into?
For my house I use a 4G router and a combination of ethernet and wifi over the LAN. 4G is also fine for kayaking, but if I had a larger boat that went further out and for longer I would probably consider satellite options.
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Bye bye future space launches once we have full or partial Kessler syndrome.
Bye bye earth based astronomy.
But dang this tech is so much better than Hughesnet
Kessler syndrome doesn’t really apply for purely LEO satellites. They all burn up in a single digit amount of years.
It’s not something to worry about yet.
On the contrary, I think it is something to avoid. Imagine letting a single person ground all space launches for 9 years. And all the pollution that adds to the atmosphere. All the junk landing on people's farms or houses.
It doesn’t work that way. I dislike Elon as much as the next sane person but we don’t need to invent new reasons to dislike him on top of all of the bad reasons that exist.
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Is starlink business model like uber/airbnb? Killing the market with low prices by circumventing regulations to establish their monopoly?
No, it just vertical integration. You need to send up rockets to make money, so you make sure they never have an empty slot on them by filling it yourself. You get enough satellites up, then you have a revenue generating payload you can send up steady from then on.
Then it is a monopoly building if you take the limited slots before others companies 😁
I was wondering because starlink's terminals are around $500 while eutelsat's are 10k. It seems it can be only possible if you accept massive losses on first years, with help of to investors to keep the company running, to take down competitors. Like uber and many others did, which had years of losses before having income.
SpaceX isn't an Uber model, its a goverment leech model. It's had heavily, heavily goverment subsidies to the tune of 18 billion dollars over its 10yr lifetime.
Terminal prices are likely just an economy of scale issue. Much cheaper per unit to make 100,000 than 1,000. Im sure as eutelsat grows the prices will come down.
If Eutelsat and the EU rocket program get 18 billion in goverment investment like SpaceX, im betting they can also accelerate all of the above.
SpaceX doesnt have a moat, it just has the lead. Rocket labs in new Zealand is already hot on their tails. No reason the EU cant join or surpass them.
What will they launch on? Star Link is barely feasible because they can launch at cost on falcon 9.
Look up Ariane 6. It's still more costly than the Falcon 9 but who in their right mind would trust the numbers Elon is sharing? Seems like they both cost around 100million $ per launch. Elon is claming 30million per launch and that he will make it cost 2 million...
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Good. Fuck Starlink.