Barcelona:
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk mentioned Tuesday he plans to invest up to 30 billion dollars to create his ambitious Starlink satellite web service.
Starlink plans to deploy thousands of low-orbit satellites to provide higher-speed web to isolated and poorly connected places.
It has so far deployed more than 1,500 satellites and by August it will be in a position to provide coverage everywhere in the world except the North and South Poles, Musk told the Mobile World Congress, a telecoms market conference underway in Barcelona, by video.
The Tesla chief mentioned he expects to invest “at least five billion dollars, and maybe as much as ten billion” in Starlink just before the service has a positive money flow.
“Then over time it is going to be a multiple of that, and that would be 20 or 30 billion dollars. It is a lot basically,” he added.
Starlink is at the moment operating in about a dozen nations, with more becoming added, and it at the moment has just more than 69,000 active customers, Musk mentioned.
“We are on our way I think to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users, within 12 months,” he added.
“There is a need for connectivity in places that don’t have it right now, or where it is very limited.”
Musk mentioned Starlink sells its terminals for $500 even although they expense the business more than $1,000 to make, so his group is working to create a model that is significantly less highly-priced. He hopes to come up with a temrinal that charges the business just $220 to $250.
“Obviously selling terminals at half price is not super compelling,” he mentioned.
Musk mentioned Starlink had two partnerships with “major company telcos” and was “in discussions with a number” of other folks, without the need of providing additional information.
He mentioned Starlink could assistance telecom firms meet rural connectivity specifications contained in licences for the new superfast 5G cellular networks which are becoming deployed about the world.
Musk’s SpaceX firm, which operates Starlink, has requested authorisation from US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy up to 42,000 satellites to provide the satellite web service.
Starlink faces competitors from a quantity of rivals such as OneWeb, a broadband satellite communications business acquired by a consortium of investors comprising the UK government and Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Global, and Amazon subsidiary Kuiper.
By the finish of 2020 some 5.2 billion persons, or 67 % of the international population, subscribed to mobile services, according to the GSMA, market body which organises the annual mobile congress.
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