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Elon Musk said his private rocket company SpaceX is willing to spend up to $ 30 billion to establish it. Starlink, your satellite internet network which now has 70,000 users in 12 countries.
Musk said Starlink is on track to provide global coverage – “everywhere except the poles” – by August and that it aims to have half a million users “in 12 months.”
SpaceX currently has 1,500 low-orbiting satellites that provide broadband Internet service for Starlink, a service that fills geographic gaps between areas covered by terrestrial fiber connections and 5G, Musk said. At full capacity, the service will have 12,000 satellites.
“It’s really meant for sparsely populated regions,” Musk said, speaking from California in a video interview for Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. “We really get to parts of the world that are harder to access, the hardest to get to 3%, possibly 5%.”
The $ 30 billion investment figure cited by Musk was new and is multiple times higher than previous forecasts, although it is unclear whether this projection can be directly compared to previous estimates. Musk said the figures will vary depending on whether the development of the Falcon 9 rocket is included.
In a 2018 TED Talk, Chief of Operations Gwynne Shotwell said setting up 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 it becomes a positive cash flow and generally estimated costs to be between $ 20 billion and $ 30 billion. “It’s basically a lot,” he said.
Musk made no comment on Starlink’s revenue potential, but in the past predicted it could reach annual revenues of $ 30 billion by 2025.
Musk acknowledged that all previous attempts to provide constellation-based broadband services, dating back to the 1990s, have failed. He joked that a few years ago, his goal was simply to avoid bankruptcy.
The cost of a Starlink satellite dish is $ 499, plus a monthly subscription cost of $ 99. Musk said the hardware currently costs about double what it is charging customers.
The billionaire entrepreneur also said that Starlink has signed two major telecommunications partnerships, but did not want to name them.
In December, the Starlink project received nearly $ 900 million in US federal grants to support rural broadband connections. The prize accounted for about one-tenth of the $ 9.2 billion auction held by the Federal Communications Commission and will be distributed monthly for a decade.
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