Another day, another regulatory approval for Elon Musk to launch more satellites than he has up there already. It's almost a "dog bites man" item at this point — but only almost. This one has all kinds of cool little angles.
"In a regulatory win," PCMag reported on Tuesday, "SpaceX has secured approval to launch and operate 15,000 next-gen satellites for Starlink Mobile, the company’s service to deliver satellite connectivity to phones."
Satellite smartphones, cool. When you're outdoors.
The problem with satellite phone service is that the tiny, low-powered antenna in your phone can only barely keep a connection with a sat even in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Put a roof over your head and fuggedaboutit.
PJ Media's own Charlie Martin and I actually discussed this scenario a year or two ago, when Musk first talked about selling cellular service — and the answer was bolted to my roof.
I'm a Starlink customer, and there's no reason SpaceX's Starphone* service couldn't glom onto my WiFi just like my AT&T-provided phone does every time I pull into my garage.
*For now the name is Starlink Mobile, but isn't Starphone both cooler and more in line with the company's naming conventions?
But what happens when I go to my corner bar for my traditional lunch of burger, fries, and martini, and the satellite signal dies the moment I walk in the door?
This is a (mostly) solved problem.
Back when Xfinity was still my ISP, the company had courtesy WiFi service seemingly everywhere. It hardly mattered where I was; if I needed WiFi, there was an Xfinity router nearby that used the same login credentials any-and-everywhere. Bad cell service? Hitting your data cap? Just look for the Xfinity router in your phone's WiFi settings.
The trick — and this is something Xfinity couldn't do, since they were serving as a replacement for your cell provider — is making the handoff from satellite to WiFi (and back again) so seamless that the user never notices, anywhere in the world.
Here's where it helps to do what Musk does and think big.
Getting businesses to host a Starlink router is no big deal — Xfinity has been doing it for years. Making it portal-less for that seamless transition ought to be a no-brainer, too. It already works at home, and for out-and-about, SpaceX seems to have that problem solved, too. For airlines like United that offer Starlink to their passengers, SpaceX requires that the service be both free and without any login screen.
Installing stuff on airplanes is time-consuming and expensive. Locally, no big deal.
Let's say you own a small bar (a dream of mine since Cheers, honestly), and SpaceX comes along and offers to put a router in your place — at no cost to you — and a neon FREE STARLINK sign to hang in the window. That's how the company builds out the indoors part of its cellular service in the business world.
But residential? Aye, that's still the rub, because I don't want my phone to stop working when I go over to my neighbor's house for drinks, and he isn't a Starlink user.
And Another Thing: Delta's real beef with Starlink might not have been due to a personal grudge between CEO Ed Bastian and Musk. Delta reportedly insisted on putting their branding on Musk's service, along with a mandatory login portal that required fliers to sign up for Delta miles. SpaceX said no, that's not how we do things, and Delta went off in a huff to Amazon's rival Leo service — that won't even be up and running for another two years.
One solution is to set up ground-based repeaters (cellular or WiFi) in dead zones. That's hardly ideal, of course, but over time, I suspect SpaceX will be able to shrink the dead zones down to virtually nothing for reasons I'm about to reveal.
The answer once again turns out to be as obvious as the Starlink transceiver on my roof: Don't sell the phone; sell the bundle — and watch the dead zones disappear all on their own.
For one low monthly price, SpaceX might sell you high-speed internet service, works-anywhere satellite cellular, and (probably) a brand-new Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy (your choice!) every three years. Once SpaceX has Starmind (orbital AI service) up and running (or even before then), an extra $20 or $30 a month gets you all the Grok you can eat.
You get the convenience of one-stop shopping and a phone that works literally anywhere in the world, seamlessly and without friction. SpaceX — and this is where my SPCX shares start doing the happy dance — gets endless subscription revenue.
Physically, is it possible?
Yes, and we saw why last week during Starship's deployment of the first operational Version 3 (V3) Starlink satellites. Those 26 birds increased the throughput of Starlink's existing constellation of 11,100 satellites by an estimated 2.3%.
What that means is, a fully loaded Starship deploying 60 V3s will increase capacity by a little under 5%. Every 20 Starship launches will nearly double Starlink's current ability to deliver.
That's less than two months' worth of Falcon 9 launches, and by one estimate, "Starlink will soon have more bandwidth than the entire terrestrial internet combined."
Who's going to beat SpaceX on price, particularly with services and hardware sold in a convenient bundle?
I'm not saying that a theoretical Starlink/Starmind/Starphone combo would be for everybody, but I am saying...
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