Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat.
Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise - people just do without.
Starlink will change this game because of their drastically increased capacity (assuming they get sat-sat links working). Until another mega-constellation comes online I fully expect them to do to satellite Internet what they did to the launch market.
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.
and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.
Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRDM/iridium-commu...
Neither do Viasat’s:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VSAT/viasat/profit...
For some reason, Inmarsat has very nice profit margins though:
https://craft.co/inmarsat/metrics
Interesting that Viasat was able to purchase Inmarsat given the figures.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTEQ/intelsat-sa/...
SES SA is doing well, but only a couple years of data:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SGBAF/ses-sa/profi...
But yes, I did in fact assume it to be higher.
Viasat simply has near zero profit margins, and quite a few years with losses.
Inmarsat looks like it has 20% or so profit margin for the last few years, but I could not quickly find more years of data.
Also, I would expect decent (10%+) profit margins for a business with few customers and extremely costly barriers to entry. Both of those factors add to volatility, and investors would require a commensurate return to make it worth investing in.
Not if they have to replace 100's of satelites due to their 4 years life spawn.
There are videos showing calculations and how crazy starlink is from business perspective. Money doesn't add up in long term.
