There is a very sharp elbow coming to Starlink's bandwidth charts, but the vast majority of investors are treating it as incremental or simply ignoring it.
I find it helpful to use recent history to illustrate a point. Luckily we have data to show the last Starlink Inflection, and I believe its highly likely to closely illustrate what's coming for us in the next ~12 months.
[first screenshot] you can see that in Feb 2023 Starlink transitioned from V1 to V2. At that time their global bandwidth was ~64 Tbps. Though linear, the historic starlink bandwidth growth looked quite impressive from 2020-2023.
The V2 mini sat was a substantial bandwidth increase ~5.5X more bandwidth per sat, but only ~2.1X bandwidth per launch because the sats we're more massive.
[second screenshot] shows one year of V2 deployments. 187 Tbps was a 3X of global starlink bandwidth in one year. Due to V2's ~2.1X bandwidth per launch and an near doubling in launch cadence.
[Video] you can see this trend continue and accelerate with V2 Optimized from 2024 to 2026, to the point that it makes the first 3-4 years of starlink bandwidth look flat, the same growth that looked sharp in 2023.
Bandwidth growth matters because it's the supply side of the market dynamic.
The historical relationship between Starlink bandwidth growth and customer growth has been correlated even if not completely causal.
2022 -> 2026
'22 Customers 1M | Bandwidth 57 Tbps
'26 Customers 10M | Bandwidth ~600 Tbps
Clearly both customers and bandwidth grew an order of magnitude over that period. To be clear there has been corresponding decrease in consumer's price for connectivity that plays a role making the customer growth number not pure 1:1 to bandwidth growth.
BTW - this was the point of Elon's earning statement about 100X bandwidth at 1/10th the cost to consumer/enterprise still driving toward ~$200B in revenue. there likely won't be 90% cost reductions inside 5 years, but if they did somehow that would be very good for consumers and enterprises.
Fast forward to this month and the main point I was trying to make at the beginning. Starlink V3 is clearly another inflection, if underappreciated.
We are looking at potentially the first operational deployment of V3 starlink sats in September.
how does a the V2 -> V3 jump compare to the V1 -> V2 jump?
V2 -> V3 bandwidth/sat:
V2 is 96 Gbps
V3 is ~1,000 Gbps
the V2:V3 jump (10X) is twice the size of the V1:V2 jump (5.5x) on a per sat basis. What about the starship of it all?
V2 -> V3 Sats/Launch:
V2 had ~28 on a F9
V3 has 20-60 on a Starship
The V2:V3 jump compounded by the F9:Starship means the bandwidth per launch is 7x-22x, compared to 2.1X per launch for V1:V2 jump.
another way to say this is that V2:V3 bandwidth acceleration over the next 12 months will be 3-10X greater than the V1:V2 inflection from Feb 2023-Feb 2024.
Once you appreciate this mathematical certainty the only questions that remain is how much do prices need to drop (if at all) to keep customer growth and bandwidth growth as close to 1:1 as possible.
History rhymes and this history lesson points to the fact that Starlink is a generational cash engine and will fund and functionally connect the AI compute build out.
I'd suggest watching the video to get a sense of how inflections play out in realish time.