The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.
I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.
With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.
There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.
In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
it is well known that Australia has an extremely lazy workforce that refuse to put in any real work.
the best example here is the stupid residential building cost. nowadays it costs over $1m AUD or $700k USD do a first floor 2bedroom 1 bathroom extension for an existing house in good condition. That is significantly more expensive than building a big house in the US.
let's don't even start on the quality of those new builds, that would be the laughing stock of the entire world.
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
AI data centers in space, of course!
That is very valuable.
The payload we send to space is very limited and the 300% increase in the few last years was ONLY starlink itself.
Thats the issue Musk has to sell it to the investors and his idea is datacenter payload.
Just that he would need to send 300 Starships up there to even install a smallish datacenter like his own colossus 1.
Starship is not done yet, we have not seen it fly up there and return for 300 times at all.
Sad to see this place becoming a normal web forum.
Is your position that _you_ can make assertions without evidence but that lesser mortals may not contradict you without writing a paper on the subject?
I’m convinced that a large part of the user base of this site is genuinely, literally, solipsistic.
And i brought an argument. You said it makes space-x very valuable and i explain that the amount of payload we even send up is very limited which contracditcs 'very valuable'.
I then explain further what Elon Musks plan is to sell us his trillion dollar company or how you frame it 'very valuable' and explain why it doesn't work