Shares of Starlink's European rival Eutelsat have tripled
91 points by _fizz_buzz_ 3 months ago | 105 comments- palata 3 months ago> Matching Starlink’s 40,000 would take “a couple of months, not years.”
Wow, that's faster than I would have expected. Good thing in this case!
- raverbashing 3 months agoI think matching in coverage, not necessarily matching in the same LEO scheme as Starlink
- friseurtermin 3 months agoThe article phrases this weirdly, but they are talking about the 40,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine that Eutelsat is trying to match, not about LEO satellites.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3 months agoEutelsat's oneweb subsidary currently has something over 500 satellites in LEO orbit. I think starlink has over 7000. I don't know much about all of this, but I assume if it just about covering ukraine they won't have to match the 7000 starlink satellites. The whole situation might open a opportunity for oneweb to catch up with starlink.
- ninalanyon 3 months agoThe number refers to the ground terminals not satellites.
- mlindner 3 months agoEutelsat already has global coverage. So coverage is also the wrong word to use.
- friseurtermin 3 months ago
- mlindner 3 months agoThe CEO is blatantly lying to you at a level that I would call securities fraud.
First off the basic facts are wrong, SpaceX has just over 7000 satellites, not 40,000.
Secondly it is physically impossible to launch even 7000 satellites within a few months, even for SpaceX. The satellites do not exist and would need to be built which takes over a year at a minimum. Europe launches rockets into space a couple times a year and you can only launch around a dozen or two satellites per launch. That means just to reach 7000 satellites, assuming 20 per launch and a generous 10 launches per year is over 3.5 years to launch all those satellites.
Edit: The problem appears to be with the low quality terminology.
It is using the word "satellites" to refer to ground terminals. Ground terminals are not "satellites".
It is still incorrect however as Eutelsat doesn't have the bandwidth required to serve what SpaceX is providing to Ukraine. They can provide a backup, but it will be significantly degraded versus what Ukraine already uses.
- argsnd 3 months agoThey’re not lying you’re just not reading. They’re talking about terminals on the ground.
- porridgeraisin 3 months ago> low quality terminology
What? The article never used satellite to refer to ground terminals. They used the word terminals.
- yencabulator 3 months agoThe byline does say "to get as many satellites into Ukraine as [...]", which doesn't sound pleasant.
- yencabulator 3 months ago
- argsnd 3 months ago
- raverbashing 3 months ago
- Simon_O_Rourke 3 months agoThis can only be a good thing. The Europeans tend to do things a bit more slowly but more rigorously.
- eru 3 months agoI'm not sure. It might just be related to the US (and by extension American companies) being seen as less reliable in light of recent political developments.
- etiam 3 months agoOf course. The US "negotiators" for the so called mineral deal trying fleece Ukraine, a state fighting valiantly for it's freedom and continued existence, out of 400 billion dollars in protection payments, had it as piece of the coercion to threaten cutting Starlink access. In context, that's literally an act of war.
Nobody wants to be addicted to this and vulnerable to being coerced and manipulated by threats of having service revoked at catastrophic times unless they do exactly whatever Musk and his puppetmasters say.
- mlindner 3 months agoCutting off Starlink was never threatened on Ukraine access. SpaceX, Musk and Ukraine themselves (both Zelensky and other Ukrainian government officials) have all denied it.
- FirmwareBurner 3 months agoUnpopular opinion: How else should Ukraine pay for the military assistance it's receiving? That's not cheap. The US, NATO and EU taxpayers don't owe Ukraine anything for free since there's no contractual obligation to do so. Money doesn't just rain from the sky, the US and EU taxpayer are ultimately bankrolling this.
Sharing profits from your natural resources in exchange for military resources seems like a great deal to me. Nothing in life is ever free, someone is always paying for it, usually through taxes. If you think this logic is flawed, argument me why.
- mlindner 3 months ago
- rsynnott 3 months agoAnd, like, particularly companies _owned by US government officials_. I can't see how any country could be particularly comfortable with this for official use.
- bayindirh 3 months agoFrom my experience, it depends. Some European brands and some US brands build goods which you can leave for future generations.
US brands are more visible since they have not been affected by WWII too much, and Europeans had to rebuild things, but there are brands and tools which I enjoy using, and some of these tools are pass-downs.
- etiam 3 months ago
- 0xy 3 months ago[flagged]
- msh 3 months agoThe chip in your phone (or non intel computer) would like to disagree. It is most likely manufactured using tech from the EU (ASML).
- bayindirh 3 months agoYes. That's OP is true. Let me add some more things which are not used anywhere on the world.
- Bosch Automotive: Probably powers at least half of the cars one way or other in the US.
- Chrysler's MultiJet Diesel, actually invented twice by Fiat, and led to Fiat's absorption of Chrysler since they have failed their "usage" obligations.
- Siemens' industrial automation, probably powers half of the world's advanced PLC requirements.
- ASML: Building the machines almost everyone uses to create the ICs you're using to read this very comment.
- NXP Semiconductor: A spin-off of Philips of Netherlands.
- Wera: Purveyor of premium hand tools. Not made for heavy abuse, but used by companies like Apple (a small startup in US which has more money than a couple countries combined) in their factories and service centers as official tools supplier (Plus Japanese Camera Manufacturers Group use them to make JIS approved screwdrivers).
- Rolls Royce Aerospace: They just make puny airplane engines which most of the world uses.
- Airbus: Makes planes which doesn't have doors which disassemble mid-flight.
Dunno. This is what I came up in five minutes. They're irrelevant, indeed.
- bayindirh 3 months ago
- pantalaimon 3 months agoJust wait until you learn about Cyber Resilience Act that will quelch any hardware startup
- msh 3 months ago
- eru 3 months ago
- verzali 3 months agoEuropean stocks are overall outperforming US ones this year. They're up about 10% since January, US ones have fallen by about 2%.
- consumer451 3 months agoThis is certainly an interesting pairing:
- stogot 3 months agoCan we use cross-border stocks to indicate a baseline? There’s hundreds of variables.
Though US uncertainty right now is a leading cause of share price suppression
- r00fus 3 months agoAs long as Europe doesn't get dragged into the tariff tarpit that US has jumped into, I think they'll do much better.
- consumer451 3 months ago
- bluescrn 3 months agoBut do they have the capabilities to put satellites into orbit cost-effectively without supporting 'evil Elon'?
- INTPenis 3 months agoThis may come as a shock but European companies have been putting commercial satelites into orbit since the 70s.
- boxed 3 months agoYea, at enormous cost, and very slowly. Europe was also totally without any launch capacity for quite a while since Ariane 6 didn't work out great.
- Yeul 3 months agoIndependence has a price. Something European countries are very aware of.
- rsynnott 3 months ago> Europe was also totally without any launch capacity for quite a while since Ariane 6 didn't work out great.
As someone else mentioned, Vega C was operational during this period, but also, define 'quite a while'. Last Ariane 5 launch was in mid 2023, First Ariane 6 launch was in mid 2024.
Eutelsat is a commercial company, of course, and doesn't have to use Arianespace/ESA stuff; they have in the past used Ariane 4 and 5, Proton, Falcon 9, and various Atlases and Deltas, and are a fairly obvious candidate customer for Blue Origin.
- josefx 3 months agoThe Ariane 6 is mainly for larger payloads. Europe was still using Vega and Vega-C for satellites .
- Yeul 3 months ago
- boxed 3 months ago
- _fizz_buzz_ 3 months ago> cost-effectively
becomes less relevant when national security is on the line.
- oldpersonintx 3 months ago[dead]
- FirmwareBurner 3 months agoCost is very much relevant since money doesn't fall from the sky. Someone is still paying for it.
@lm28469 I'll edit and answer for you here instead of an additional reply: Falling from the ECB's printers is not free money from "the sky", it's money created by additional inflation, which is a tax on all of us, especially on the poor, which in turn leads to a lower standard of living, desperation and votes towards political extremism. How can people be this economically illiterate is beyond me. You can't complain people are voting right when you're making them poorer through your economic policies. For every action there is a reaction.
- oldpersonintx 3 months ago
- Gud 3 months agoNo, but they will soon with Rocket Labs Neutron rocket.
Time will tell if moving Rocket Lab to the US was such a wise move. I hope they slowly start shifting their launches to Europe.
- askl 3 months agoDoes "evil Elon" imply there's also a "good Elon"?
- bluescrn 3 months agoThere's a heck of a lot of good people doing great work at SpaceX and Tesla, and all the lashing out at Elon's companies is mostly going to hurt them, not the man himself.
- bluescrn 3 months ago
- benterix 3 months agoI don't think he is "evil" as in "wanting to make people suffer", just going through a peculiar period of his life and because of the power he has he is able to influence the lives of others more than earlier when he was just an interesting and at times funny Internet phenomenon.
Apart from that, we do see the world change in front of our eyes so when your ex-allies are becoming unstable it's natural you are evaluating your options, it's not specifically about Musk in this case.
- louthy 3 months agoThis isn’t a ‘phase’, this is who he is [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
- Terr_ 3 months ago> He was such a legend on Komarr. And yet when I finally met him, he seemed just an ordinary fellow. [...] He was not... what I expected."
> Not a monster? Laisa was a polite Komarran; you had to give her credit for that. "Real monsters," observed Miles, answering her thought instead of her words, "often are just ordinary men. Only more confused in their thinking. [...]"
-- Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
- wiredfool 3 months agoGreen Silk Rooms.
- wiredfool 3 months ago
- GJim 3 months ago> just going through a peculiar period of his life
Of all the remarks made by Elron apologists, this one takes the cake!
- louthy 3 months ago
- INTPenis 3 months ago
- josefritzishere 3 months agoBy virtue of not wasting time on drugs, mania and celebrity it looks like Eutelstat is poised to crush Starlink
- etiam 3 months agoDoes anyone know how the terminals are built? Any chance the Starlink branded ones are actually generic enough to be used with a better firmware?
- actionfromafar 3 months agoEven if they somehow are compatible in principle (frequencies etc) it would be like developing a new product, but one where you will never get any new hardware, and without any documentation on said hardware. I.e. a nightmare.
- etiam 3 months agoIt makes sense what you say, though for some hellish physical working conditions it might have been worth to pay the engineering nightmare for a while.
Do you think it's achievable for basic functionality in time to be meaningful, if it were for a few months that would otherwise have outage / shortage i a lot of places?
- etiam 3 months ago
- actionfromafar 3 months ago
- askl 3 months agoHow different are these two systems?
Might be worth modifying the Starlink terminals so they work with Eutelsat infrastructure instead of becoming scrap.
- verzali 3 months agoUnlikely to be easily possible. The chips inside the Starlink terminal will not work with Eutelsat or any other network than Starlink. In theory Eutelsat and Starlink might be able to work together to make them compatible, but it would be difficult and complex. It is easier just to distribute new equipment.
- verzali 3 months ago
- aaron695 3 months ago[dead]
- mlindner 3 months agoThe title is intellectually dishonest. Eutelsat is not in any way a rival to Starlink. They are not at all playing in the same league.
Starlink has over 7000 satellites. Eutelsat has several hundred they got from their purchase of OneWeb and isn't increasing them by much.
The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
- patall 3 months ago> The reason why Eutelsat stock is increasing is because investors think that Europe is going to go nuts with "buy European" in the military space which would allow them to sell their services at inflated pricing as it's no longer a fair market between OneWeb and Starlink.
I cannot follow. Where did this happen? Isn't it the US that is not offering Starlink anymore? And did Eutelsat increase prices or did their competition change TOS? This is a form of victim blaming.
- mlindner 3 months agoThe US has not stopped providing Starlink in any way. This is entirely based around fear that the US government may suddenly stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink connectivity. Also Eutelsat is not a victim. My point is that they're capitalizing on Europe's fears.
(And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.)
There hasn't been any threats to stop providing Ukraine with Starlink either. (There was a single news media source claiming this, but it was denied by SpaceX, Musk, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials.)
- piva00 3 months ago> (And there is no historic precedent for Starlink to stop serving anyone either as they have never done so in the past.)
Hmm...
- MrCzar 3 months ago> This is entirely based around fear that the US government may suddenly stop supplying Ukraine with Starlink connectivity
And is that not a valid fear? Why is Elon/Starlink's denial of threats to cut off Ukraine more trustworthy than Reuter's reporting?
Isn't the US government capitalising on fear as we speak in the recent Tariff wars and such?
Starlink needs competition and I hope that will come.
- reinhardt1053 3 months ago
- koonsolo 3 months agoIs that fear irrational? Let me state some facts:
1. Elon Musk is in full control of Starlink
2. Elon is politically aligned with Trump
3. Trump is pressuring Ukraine by taking away any US support. He paused military equipment delivery that was already approved, and now cut intelligence sharing.
It doesn't seem that far fetched that they would use cutting Starlink in these negotiations.
A counter argument could be that Elon still wants to get revenue for this (I think Poland is paying for it).
In my opinion, Starlink is a threat to European security, in an ever growing hostile US. Remember that Trump explicitly didn't exclude taking EU territory by force.
Even if Starlink isn't cut, they would most likely use it in their negotiations for Ukraine to "peacefully" surrender (partly) to Russia.
- piva00 3 months ago
- mlindner 3 months ago
- patall 3 months ago