SpaceX's Starlink Registers in India, Aims To Deploy 200,000 Active Terminals by 2022

Starlink, part of Elon Musk's SpaceX company, has formed a subsidiary in India and is preparing to apply for licenses from the local government, according to a top official. From a report: "Pleased to share that SpaceX now has a 100% owned subsidiary in India," Sanjay Bhargava, India director for Starlink, said in a LinkedIn post Monday. Starlink's local India unit is registered with the name Starlink Satellite Communications Private Limited. A local unit is required for an internet company to offer its services in India, where Starlink -- assuming that it gets the license -- plans to offer 200,000 active terminals in over 160,000 districts by December 2022, the company representatives said. That's an ambitious goal for the company, which as of August had shipped 100,000 user terminals in 14 countries.

Not a fan of Elon and his company but...

[mikeiver1]

Not a fan of Elon and his company and I hate what these sats have done to the night sky and astronomy. I have installed one of the Starlink systems and given it a run through. Setup was really easy and there is no aiming at all. It was fast from the start and got faster after a day. Like near 200Mbps on the down load. The pings were on a par with the local cable provider to the same servers on the west coast as well as the east coast. For a fringe area this is a fantastic option. To bad that this was the choice rather than the phone and cable companies doing what they were payed to do and getting broadband to the remote places they said they would. But hay, executive bonuses and dividends are more important.

Re:Not a fan of Elon and his company but...

[Photo_Nut]

Rural India is very far behind on its network connectivity. The fact that Starlink can enable broadband access far and wide should be seen as an opportunity to expand services and opportunities to the rest of the world. Countries in Africa and Europe and regions of the US all have poor connectivity outside the more populated city areas, and the telephone and cable companies are not invested enough in the opportunity to connect people. There are lots of remote locations that are just too expensive to connect terrestrially. There are going to be huge profits from Starlink, but the ingenious mechanism that made it all possible was the Falcon 9's landing capability. SpaceX is maybe 5-20 years ahead of its closest competitors in landing heavy orbital launch vehicles, and their research on Starship is at a necessary speed to remain the worldwide leaders when countries like China can out-invest companies in the USA.

Nationalism is OK in my book if the competition breeds advancements for humanity.

Re:

[ghoul]

Frankly Starlink was launched as a way to generate payloads for Falcon. There were simply not enough payloads once you had a fleet of reusable orbital launch vehicles. Its a solution looking for a problem. Most of Rural India has cellphone access which is about to get upgraded to 5G soon. So dont know how much of a market there is for Starlink.

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[Hodr]

Which is really a non-issue. Every customer is practically 100% profit since the infrastructure (sans ground stations in India) already exists and there are no real impacts to their original target user base.

Re:

[BranMan]

I don't consider it a solution in search of a problem. I think of it more as an extension of what the Internet became. Routing got better, speeds and payload sizes increased exponentially. OK - you have all this bandwidth - what can you do with it? Any, boy, did people come up with stuff (good and bad, of course) to use that bandwidth.

Basically the same here. It's opening up a world of opportunity, and like the Internet, I'm not sure what will move in. But it will be exciting to see.

Re: Not a fan of Elon and his company but...

[IdanceNmyCar]

China appears to be working on a reusable re-entry space vehicle but the news is rather scarce. From what I can tell it uses a similar booster that would land like the falcon-9 but a re-entry craft like the X-37B but piloted. If they pull it off, could be quite interesting. However, of course it's not really mentioned in many publications so we are really all just speculating.

I agree the future of SpaceX looks amazing with a huge head start and an approach to development that has allowed them to go further

Re:

[Guspaz]

The problem is that a lot of areas that most seriously need Starlink connectivity won't be able to afford it. Many people in rural India can't afford to spend five hundred US dollars for the equipment and a hundred US dollars a month for the connectivity. And they're charging the same thing in India as the US.

It's also currently against the terms of service to share a dish with multiple households, so the cost can't be spread among the community.

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[timeOday]

It's against the terms of service that individual $100/mo subscribers get here. It's really hard for me to imagine Starlink won't set up cell towers that use their satellite network as the backbone where no fiber exists, why would they not do that?

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[drinkypoo]

It's also currently against the terms of service to share a dish with multiple households, so the cost can't be spread among the community.

They will probably change those terms eventually, although I won't be surprised if they charge more for accounts which permit sharing. But they're going to get as many subscribers as they can before they do anything like that, for sure.

In any case nothing really prevents such sharing anyway.

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[apraetor]

Satellite phones are illegal in India without a waiver from the government, because "terrorism". I'm quite surprised these are being permitted, given they work just fine as a portable hotspot for VoIP.

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[Deal In One]

Agreed that rural india is badly behind when it comes to internet speed. So are most of the larger towns, from my understanding.

Only thing that concerns me are the charges Starlink is planning on. If they plan on 100USD monthly(I understand thats about the price for wherever they are providing a service), very few in rural india can afford it.

But if they charge just 5-10 USD a month, it will be alot more affordable, although there will still be many who can't afford it.

Of course a satellite flying over a co

Re:Not a fan of Elon and his company but...

[jfdavis668]

I'm an amateur astronomer, and am not bothered by Starlink so far. Only the first few launches were really visible. Now I have gone out looking for them and can't see them. They are only really visible for a very short window after sunset and before sunrise. I haven't had an marked increase satellite trails in my images. Have always had things go through the shots: meteors, planes, rocket bodies and satellites. Fairly easy to process out when stacking. I did have one night when my subject lined up with the train of geosynchronous satellites, and every single image had a track across it. I know it will probably get worse over time as more are put up by the dozens of companies working on it, but right now it is not that bad.

200k active terminals in India?

[Mark of the North]

I just want one active backyard terminal in Middleofnowhere, Canada.

We are just finishing the last couple of necessities (like a working toilet) for the rural off-grid house we are building. In a couple of weeks, we should be able to move in. Since we are spoiled in town with fibre, I tried to time things so that the Starlink service would be up and running by move-in day and placed our order mid-September. Haven't heard a thing since. I'm not too bothered about it, as my internet dependence is minimal an

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[rogoshen1]

I put my deposit down in February, and haven't heard anything since regarding getting our service (southern oregon; it's odd though, there's a few people on our road who have it.. so it's definitely offered out here).

Previously we were on vilesat, whose operations as an ISP are borderline fraudulent. We're about 30 miles from the nearest 'city'; and our only other option has been cellular hotspots, which are vastly better than vilesat, but very low allotments of bandwidth each month (100gb per line) -- bu

Re:

[ericspinder]

You really need a good view of the sky. When I installed mine at my mother's single story house I had thought a nearby tree wasn't a consideration. I few weeks later it showed up as a tiny sliver which caused a minute or so of total of obstruction related downtime. However, I only saw the notification for a couple of weekends, now it shows as just fine.

I would suggest installing it near or above the treeline, perhaps even putting it on an antenna tower or some other thing.

200k in india by 2022?

[SirSpanksALot]

200k in india by 2022? Where the fuck is my terminal... I'm in an active cell in the US and haven't heard shit...

Curious

[Ol Olsoc]

What's going to happen when India starts demanding that Musk follow rules. He takes a shitfit because he doesn't believe he has to follow any rules the FAA has - that they are stopping progress and that he should be able to launch when he feels like it.

India might have demands he doesn't believe he has to follow.

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[timeOday]

That's what "getting the license" means - coming to terms by which they can offer the service.

Re: Curious

[shm]

Indeed. Look up the Central Monitoring System.

Re:

[Ol Olsoc]

Indeed. Look up the Central Monitoring System.

That won't sit will with Ol Muskie or his cult. One of those works around where I do, and seriously, he would lay down his life if Musk asked him to.

Re: Curious

[shm]

He wonâ(TM)t get very far with our current govt with that attitude. They donâ(TM)t bend over.

This might end up being a backhaul for rural

[shm]

If they are pushing US pricing, the only way this will work is by turning the sat link into a back haul.

I wonder if the latency will support base stations for regular cellphone 4G and 5G? Anyone?

Re:

[apraetor]

The latency is on par with existing cable modem service -- 20 ms or so. That's just fine for wifi calling, doesn't matter if it's cable, fiber or low-latency satellite.

Good Morning!

[GWXerog]

Let us hope that the StarLink system is able to handle the influx of Good Morning texts from around 6AM to 10AM Delhi time https://www.wsj.com/articles/t... [wsj.com]