SpaceX’s ability to quickly change and upgrade services is inconvenient for vendors, the head of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband group said Sept. 13.

“It’s been challenging because we’ve been so nimble, and we have to be smarter about how we do it,” Starlink VP of Commercial Sales Jonathan Hofeller said on September 13. [це] “It affects our dealers.”

He said it’s not unusual for SpaceX to add a Starlink plan on Friday and accept it on Monday.

“Well, it affects our partners, and we’re learning to be better partners in that sense,” he said during a World Satellite Business Week panel in Paris.

But he said Starlink’s ability to iterate quickly helps the company adapt to changing customer needs and plans. Continuous improvement also allows Starlink to respond to sudden events such as natural disasters and other changes on a regional or global basis.

SpaceX can also quickly change and upgrade Starlink services because the vertically integrated company builds and launches satellites in-house. Starlink, which initially focused solely on selling direct to consumers, opened its reseller channels about a year ago to help expand into markets such as shipping, energy and aviation.

“We have a channel dispute,” Hofeller said, “that’s one of the things we’re looking into and…we’re trying to figure out how to resolve it.”

But Starlink “is also seeing that customers are looking for additional value-added services like cybersecurity, deployment, customer support, in addition to great, raw, high-speed, low-latency capacity,” and so the company is “turning to our partners to deliver that to end users.”

Earlier in the day, Starlink announced a partnership with SES, which operates a group of geostationary and medium Earth orbit satellites, to provide unified services for cruise lines. SES takes the lead in selling and managing the joint offering, including antenna installation.

finance

According to Hofeller, Starlink currently has more than 1.5 million customers worldwide. Although he did not discuss finances, he did say that the company no longer subsidizes users’ antennas. According to the Wall Street Journal, based on applications on September 13, Starlink’s revenue in 2022 increased from $222 million the previous year to $1.4 billion.

According to the report, in its investor presentation in 2015, the company predicted that Starlink would generate net revenue of approximately $12 billion in 2022, have 20 million subscribers by the end of the year, and generate an operating profit of $7 billion. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX posted a profit of $55 million in the first three months of 2023, following a loss in 2022.

SpaceX did not comment on the reports.

During the conference, Hofeller was asked about the failure rate of the more than 5,000 Starlink satellites launched to date, which is tracked by spaceflight observer Jonathan McDowell, and he said he didn’t know the data. Massimiliano Ladovaz, OneWeb’s chief technical officer, told conference delegates that after deploying more than 630 satellites for his group, there were four failures.

“Obviously we wouldn’t want those four failures to happen,” he said, “but that’s a pretty low percentage considering it’s a new field.” Source