Elon Musk’s Starlink is well on its way to completing its first tier of 4,000 low Earth orbiting satellites. Recent data shows that 3,875 craft have been launched (including some Gen-2 versions), although not all reached orbit. Nevertheless, a report from Tim Farrar of TMF Associates suggests that Musk’s SpaceX is targeting a new business despite already securing private and commercial broadband users as well as military, aircraft and shipping and even RV owners. Farrar says: “There’s been plenty of hype about the Direct-to-Device (D2D) market for satellite to smartphone connectivity in the last couple of years, and that has only intensified in the wake of recent announcements about Apple’s partnership with Globalstar and Qualcomm’s partnership with Iridium. Some analysts have even gone so far as to suggest that D2D represents the ‘largest opportunity in Satcom’s history’”. He adds that a move into D2D represents “significant” technical challenges although identifies the recent Apple+Globalstar agreement cost Apple little more than $100 million per year and is capable of “billions of messages per year”. “Nevertheless, D2D is becoming the next opportunity that SpaceX can hype, beyond its core fixed broadband market, as it looks for additional increases in the company’s valuation […]
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