Elon Musk is an astute businessman who knows the value of partnerships. His company’s latest Starlink partnership with Google is the kind of stuff that changes everything.
Join us as we explore my Starlink partnership with google and how it changes everything. SpaceX is known for its exploits in the space travel industry with contracts from NASA and launching satellites for other companies; however, SpaceX has another business growing by leaps and bounds when Musk realized he would need lots of money to fund his effort to colonize Mars.
He came up with a way to make money by providing high-speed satellite internet services, and that was how Starlink was born. Starlink put satellites in space to beam down internet connectivity to users on the earth. At the same time, it is not an entirely new business model SpaceX has managed to disrupt the industry as you would expect of any sector, Musk decides to enter.
Musk estimates Starlink could generate 50 billion dollars in revenue per year. It is already one of the most valuable privately-held businesses globally, with a total valuation of close to 100 billion dollars.
Here is how satellite internet works: SpaceX put satellites out in space, and they communicate with ground stations. The satellite then sends the signals to the consumers through radio waves. SpaceX will put a constellation of satellites around the planet for global internet connectivity.
So far, the company has put up 1740 Starlink satellites in space. Satellite internet has the potential to be faster than fiber optic cables because the radio waves move at the speed of light SpaceX is putting its satellites closer to the earth than older internet satellite companies despite still being in beta Starlink has attracted lots of subscribers which the number more than 100 000 already proving the crazy amount of interest in the service.
The users are spread across 14 countries. The number of subscribers will balloon when Starlink gets worldwide coverage Musk said worldwide coverage should come later this year. Musk said the beta would come to an end in October, but SpaceX’s chief financial officer, brett johnson, stated that SpaceX is already producing 5,000 dishes per week. This means a yearly capacity of 250,000 more than half a million people has pre-ordered or deposited for Starlink services.
Starlink won’t struggle to get customers with this tremendous amount of interest when it eventually exits the beta stage. Even then, the service will only get better for customers because the next-gen Starlink kits would come at half the production cost meaning the cost to set up the dish could be lowered from the current 499 dollar SpaceX charges 99 per month for Starlink, an absolute gold mine for the space company.
Others in the business-like amazon had better watch out because SpaceX takes no prisoners and would wipe the floor with them despite having a promising business Musk is not relenting in his forming partnerships; he is teaming up with Google, whose cloud unit will supply computing and networking resources to help Starlink deliver internet services through its satellites.
The deal will involve SpaceX installing ground stations inside google’s data centers to link with Starlink satellites. This synergy will provide ultra-fast internet services to enterprise clients. We could start seeing the outcome of the partnership as early as this year, especially since Musk has promised Starlink would exit beta mode despite the size of googling this deal is enormous because it is giving an edge in its competition the software behemoth Microsoft and online retail king Amazon in the cloud computing market.
Google needs to diversify as quickly as possible because its advert business is no longer growing at the usual rate. The cloud is a way for Google to shore up its revenue to sustain its growth, so landing a client like SpaceX is a big deal for Google because its cloud computing service will be delivered to clients at high speed the first at Google data center to host a starling the base station is in New Albany Ohio followed by other data centers in the US. Still, ultimately most of google’s data centers worldwide would be connected.
Google and SpaceX had a bit of history back in 2015; the search giant invested 900 million dollars into SpaceX, which was meant to cover various technologies, including making the satellites themselves. Hence, it is natural that the two companies would do business together. The deal benefits all the parties involved, and Google brings its cloud services to more customers through a secure and fast internet network.
It will compete with Amazon in particular, which has its project Kuipers satellite internet service to bundle with its formidable cloud business since Starlink is going to be available even in remote locations or sports that isps do not serve it means Google can offer its cloud to anybody on any part of the earth. SpaceX will get a foothold in the enterprise market. Each enterprise client google signs onto its package automatically become a client of SpaceX; much of the company’s focus has been on household or residential access, but this deal with Google will increase SpaceX’s reach by a wide margin.
the client gets a simplified package does not have to deal with two separate contracts, and more importantly, they can access google cloud regardless of their location, that means even research stations in the north pole, for example, or in the desert, can store and access their data through a high-speed the connection they can also run their applications on google cloud infrastructure instead of a local computer including ai machine learning capabilities and analytics
Commenting on the deal, google cloud’s senior vice president of the infrastructure ers hosel said Google is delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure organizations with distributive footprints have seamless, secure and fast access to the critical applications and services needed to keep their teams running. SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwen Shotwell, praised the partnership and explained starling’s high-speed, low-latency broadband with Google’s infrastructure and capabilities provide global organizations with the secure and fast connection that modern organizations expect,
according to people in the know, the deal between Google and SpaceX could last seven years; before this, Google had been spending vast sums of money to set up a private fiber-optic network to connect its data centers. It has high profile clients like Goldman Sachs and snaps Google however is not the only cloud company eager to work with Starlink
Microsoft has been courting SpaceX to bring Starlink internet connectivity to its modular Azure cloud data centers that clients can deploy anywhere; however, this model will still involve google because the data from a customer’s azure the modular data center would still pass through Starlink satellite and end up in Google’s data center before moving onto other cloud services meanwhile SpaceX is pursuing partnerships in the aviation sector too if you have ever wished for low latency half gigabit internet connectivity during a flight.
Musk said on Twitter that he is talking with commercial airlines to make your wish come true he confirmed this directly when a fan asked him if he had any plans to make Starlink available on airlines; however, even before Musk’s tweet, SpaceX’s vice president Jonathan Hoffler admitted his company was holding talks with several airlines to add Starlink in-flight wi-fi according to the executive, SpaceX had already demoed the technology and could be rolling out the products soon. He even explained how Starlink would deliver fast internet to passengers in-flight since Starlink provides a global mesh. Any airline flying underneath the global mesh will have connectivity anywhere they go.
this Starlink business will scale fast, for SpaceX is currently making the dishes between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred dollars, meaning it is eating up the loss on each word; however, with its recent breakthrough that halves the cost of production, the losses on the dishes are reduced, and SpaceX could recoup its investment faster through monthly subscriptions when SpaceX switches to the new dish design could help ram production volume up
The economies of the scale will set in assisting SpaceX to cut the cost of production further coupled with potential breakthroughs we could arrive at a point where the cost of production is below the 499 dollars SpaceX charges for the dish at that point, SpaceX could decide to lower the price further to increase its customer base or take the difference as pure profit.
If SpaceX manages to ramp up production to a million dishes in 2022, that would be 500 million dollars in revenue for dish sales alone and an extra 100 million dollars per month; in that scenario, SpaceX will take a maximum of two years to turn Starlink into a multi-billion dollar business and be printing money. This partnership with Google and airlines will help SpaceX nicely because it will introduce enterprise customers into the mix for SpaceX and hasten it to the milestone of self-sustainability.
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