Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that he intends to invest up to $30 billion in the development of his Starlink satellite Internet service.
Starlink intends to launch tens of thousands of low-orbit satellites to bring high-speed internet to be remote and underserved locations.
Mr. Musk told the Mobile World Congress, a telecoms industry convention currently taking place in Barcelona, by a video that the company has launched over 1,500 satellites. By August, it would provide service everywhere on the planet except the North and South Poles.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated he intends to invest “at least $5 billion, and possibly as much as $10 billion” in Starlink before the service generates a profit.
“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,” Added he.
Starlink is presently available in approximately a dozen countries, with more on the way, and has just over 69,000 active users, according to Mr. Musk.
“We are on our way, and I think to have a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users, within 12 months,” he continued.
“There is a demand for connectivity in places where it is now unavailable or severely constrained.”
Mr. Musk claims that Starlink sells its terminals for $500, despite the fact that they cost the company over $1,000 to produce, and that his team is working on a less-priced model. He intends to develop a temrinal that will cost the corporation between US$220 and US$250.
“Half-priced terminals aren’t very enticing,” he remarked.
Mr. Musk stated that Starlink has two collaborations with “big business telcos” and is “in conversations with a number” of others, without providing any additional information.
He said that Starlink might assist telecom companies in meeting rural connectivity requirements outlined in licenses for the world’s new super-fast 5G cellular networks.
Mr. Musk’s SpaceX company, which controls Starlink, has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch up to 42,000 satellites to deliver the satellite internet service.
OneWeb, a broadband satellite communications business owned by a coalition of investors including the UK government and Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Global, and Amazon subsidiary Kuiper are among Starlink’s competitors.
According to the GSMA, the industry body that organizes the annual mobile congress, by 2020, 5.2 billion individuals, or 67% of the world population, would have subscribed to mobile services.
Source: REUTERS