An anchor tenant for this kind of venture might be someone with a very large vehicle fleet that they want to track in rural areas, maybe delivery trucks or drones. Could be someone like John Deere for implementation of precision agriculture. Could be the US government, or a foreign government, to provide tracking of various assets. Something that gets the network to break even. I mentioned RDOF subsidies, if they could get $1B from that each year for ten years it’s surely help. The auction is in October and we’ll know in November.
These satellites operate in a relative vacuum. There is far less air up where they operate than at sea level, but there is far more air than up where geosynchronous satellites operate. It is the friction with that air that causes them to degrade so quickly.
These satellites communicate with each other, with end users and with earth stations. Even if the transmission speeds between satellites was significantly faster due to the relative air density (I don’t think it is,
@RFMan could tell us) the communication with ground still goes through the full atmosphere, so any advantage would be lost. In any event, the latency on a fiber network will be at least an order of magnitude faster than the latency on a LEO satellite network. There are subsea fibers being laid specifically to facilitate growth in high speed trading, that business isn’t going to switch over to satellite.
The market size estimate is tough to discuss without knowing the assumptions. I don’t expect the billions of people currently living subsistence lives in China, India, Pakistan, etc to ever come up the economic curve. The time for that has passed as automation will become a less expensive solution than hiring, training and retaining workers for a great many low and semi skilled jobs over the next 20 years. In the US where Amazon might use it’s own LEO network for logistics, were it to buy network capacity for this it would surely buy lower cost network capacity from a 5G provider in every urban area and use the satellites only in rural areas. It’s hard to predict what Amazon will do, it is developing both terrestrial and satellite solutions, but other trucking, transport and delivery companies will not have the option to deploy their own networks so may build a patchwork solution from both terrestrial and satellite providers, squeeze a satellite provider to match urban pricing, or outsource the whole thing to the provider who will be managing the largest delivery network in the world...Amazon.
Musk is no dummy, but what he does best, by far, is separate investors from their money. Yes, I’m jealous!