The growth of the satellite internet business is becoming increasingly relevant, thanks to companies such as Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, whose total investment costs will be between $ 20 billion and $ 30 billion, according to a forecast by Musk himself.
The Tesla CEO and founder of SpaceX, a rocket company seeking to colonize Mars, said that initial investment costs for his group before Starlink achieves substantial positive cash flow would be $ 5 billion to $ 10 billion.
“Basically, it’s a lot,” Musk said in a video interview from California on the occasion of the Mobile World Congress, the largest annual gathering of the telecommunications industry held in Barcelona.
Starlink, a set of low-orbit satellites offering high-speed connectivity to people living in remote areas, already offers a trial service and says it aims for near-full coverage of the populated world this year.
Today, the network has more than 1,500 satellites in the air and operates in a dozen countries, adding more each month, according to Musk, who predicts that the total number of customers will reach half a million in the next 12 months, up from 69,000 today.
Skeptics wonder if satellite internet can become a viable business model, because the main market it is targeting is people living in remote areas, whose numbers are too small to bear the enormous costs of internet. the initial investment.
“There is a need for connectivity in places that don’t have it now,” Musk justified; however, he also acknowledged that today, Starlink “loses money.” As proof of this is that the hardware required to provide the service to each user costs about $ 1,300, a figure that contrasts with the $ 500 they pay.
“We are working on a next-generation terminal that provides roughly the same level of capacity, but costs much less,” said the businessman.
