Musk's broadband satellite kingdom Starlink now cash flow positive – or so he claims SpaceX's satellite broadband service Starlink has achieved "breakeven cash flow," according to CEO Elon Musk, sparking speculation that a public offering for the company might now be on the cards. The Starlink service has proven to be something of a success, recently hailed in tests by network intelligence firm Ookla as the …
Looks like what's even thougher than competing with Spacex is getting people to aign up for it. Revenue stands at 10 percent of what they thought it would be by now. The customer base doesn't seem to grow as fast as the number of launched satellites. The full constellation is expected to cost 5 billion a year just ro maintain. Quite likely Musk is trying to produce some good news about "break-even" or even slightly "cash-positive" quarters before the costs increase too much.
Have you seen the price?
Also you need full sky view (which rules out a lot of places), the kit is wireless-only in its home form (you have to pay a lot more to get an Ethernet port), and the one that lets you actually move around (i.e. use on vehicles, etc.) isn't available everywhere and costs even more again. Don't know about you but paying nearly 5 times what a basic DSL line costs each month, on top of a huge layout to get something that you have to mount on your roof (and hope there's nobody nearby) and then hope the wireless penetrates into your home without affecting the speed too much isn't as great a deal as it sounded at first. (I know, I live rurally and was considering it).
Also, the speeds of the service are dropping as reality sets in that if you give everyone what they want, you need to have the back-end connectivity to supply it - Starlink has been trying to do deals all over the world to increase its ground station bandwidths, and trying to get its satellites to share the traffic among each other, which again costs a lot of money. There have been articles on The Reg about that only this year, I believe. In the meantime it appears to be applying traffic shaping and limits (hitting home users first, obviously) which are bringing it back down to what DSL supplies rather than the glorious advertising numbers.
Believe it or not, a few rural joes with little to no current Internet aren't a great money-making market in the long-term and for the more useful features, it's actually not ready and/or very expensive (not Iridium-expensive, I grant you, but not great).
Over-promised, under-delivered. As always with Musk.
Surely all those Falcon 9 launches must have cost a bit. I don't see how they could possibly be "cash positive" with all that historic debt still around the neck of Starlink. Or is this some "clever" financial trickery whereby the debt is loaded onto SpaceX instead of Starlike by providing "free" launch services?
Buying a Falcon 9 launch costs about $70M because it would cost you more to buy from someone else - if they had a working rocket and would not just pinch your satellite. Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M. Add in $5M ish for a fairing full of Starlinks and multiply by 60ish launches per year gets you to $1.5B - near enough Starlink revenue for a back-of-envelope calculation.
The real problems with Starlink lie elsewhere: The US has a good supply of wealthy rural customers barely served by complete arse-hole ISPs (even compared to Musk). That does not apply so well to the rest of the world, which is what Starlink needs to scale. That and a CEO who does not work hard to alienate half the planet on Twitter.
The next step up would be a cheaper rocket carrying larger number of bigger satellites. A much simpler problem to solve than a personality transplant for the CEO.
It's worse than that. For those 60 launches, there's the lost $50million they would have got had the launch been sold to a paying customer. That's a loss of $3billion per year, or a total cost of $4.5billion. So, StarLink sustainment on Falcon 9 is a pricey proposition. If StarLink isn't bringing in at least $5billion per year (there's a load of other costs to worry about too, like the price of the satellites), it's not worth it. Though, this does suppose that if StarLink were not there and not using up 60 launches per year, there would be paying customers who would.
You've hit the nail on the head in identifying the rural US market as the only paying market. It is the sole sane market for StarLink. The trouble is that putting up a load of LEOs is an extremely inefficient way of serving a geographically confined market. It's spending a load of money on supplying a low latency link, but is the low latency really worth $5billion a year to all those US rural customers? The alternative - say, 1 really big GEO sat costing only $1billion and lasting 15 years, is a whole lot cheaper (x75, over 15 years). So what would a rural customer prefer? 100Mbit with half a second latency for $X/month, or 100Mbit with a few millisecond latency for $75X/month.
I know what I'd take. Or if StarLink stuck at it, I know who'd be creaming in the profits (the GEO supplier).
I think StarLink is going to find it very tough to compete against the ViaSat / Inmarsat company. They've had some hiccoughs recently, but they need only get a few of the new class of GEO up into server to become a ferciously good offering.
SpaceX are not turning away any launch customers. If a new customer turns up that means one less Starlink launch. The launch cost is only this low because overheads get divided by the large number of launches. Costs are set to drop because the number of launches next year will be higher. Part of that comes from increased rocket performance allowing more return to launch site missions. That saves waiting for (and paying for) a drone ship.
There is more to LEO vs GEO. LEO is nearer so the ground antenna size can be smaller, radio power can be lower or bandwidth can be higher (reality is a mixture of all three). On the downward side, the cell size is smaller for LEO. Starlink gets to multiply the bandwidth by a larger number of cells in the same area covered by a GEO satellite.
LEO also gives the opportunity to talk directly to a cell phone. Not that valuable in the US where supporting one phone call uses bandwidth that could support a number of high paying Starlink customers (lower power and antenna size means fewer bits hogging the same amount of time as a large number of bits from a Starlink dish). The capability becomes more valuable when you have satellites that would otherwise be idle over poor countries. $100/month is to much in most of the world but shared between more subscribers it makes a reasonable back haul in remote areas.
Starlink started with the easy target market, Americans. It is adapting the effectively free coverage elsewhere to what those markets can use. It isn't the huge income Musk was talking about but no-one with a clue takes his Tweets seriously - certainly after "funding secured".
"LEO also gives the opportunity to talk directly to a cell phone. "
Not really. Phones don't have the power or a steerable antenna. The whole mobile network architecture is based on being able to reuse frequencies which makes a satellite footprint suck up a huge amount of service slots if the customer hardware is compatible. In most of the developed world there is phone service in just about every place there is a high enough density of users to justify a tower. There may be some opportunity for sat<->tower applications where an area is on the borderline for what it would cost to place a tower and run links (wire, microwave, etc). I'm not that bothered that when I'm out in the woods that I don't have signal. It can be a blessing. I take my handheld HAM radio with me and I'm not traipsing off of official trails, traveling alone or going out when the weather is looking dodgy. Decades into infesting this planet and, knock on wood, its never been an issue. I'd get rather pissed off if I was sitting around the campfire with a group and people were neck deep in their phones and taking calls. They should have stayed at home wrapped in bubblewrap and packing peanuts.
>There is more to LEO vs GEO. LEO is nearer so the ground antenna size can be smaller, radio power can be lower or bandwidth can be higher (reality is a mixture of all three).
I don't think you are as good at calculating link budgets or designing systems around them as companies like Viasat...
The geography scaling is the critical question. *If* the demand was evenly spaced globally, we’d be comparing 3000 off Starlink v1 @ 20Gbps = 60 Tbps, with maybe up to 10 (!!) Geo at 150Gbps each = 1.5Tbps. Bigger Geo birds exist, but then so does Starlink v2. Leo wins hands-down, if you want to maximise total throughput, to the level required by *millions* of private subscribers. Geo’s were optimal, during the era when subscriber numbers were tens of thousands. If your addressable market revenue only justifies 3 Geo satellites, then it’s never going to support thousands of LEO satellites. Equally, if you *need* the bandwidth of thousands of satellites, you simply can’t fit the equivalent into Geo orbital slot. There aren’t enough slots.
However, going back to the original assumption, if the only real consumer demand is concentrated in the USA, then it would be inefficient to provide it across the whole of the globe with LEOs. So it’s all about market assumptions: will the Latin America and Asia Pacific market grow to fill the supply. I don’t know, I suspect it will, but could be wrong
"You've hit the nail on the head in identifying the rural US market as the only paying market. It is the sole sane market for StarLink. The trouble is that putting up a load of LEOs is an extremely inefficient way of serving a geographically confined market. "
Common Sense Skeptic did a pretty good analysis. They are firmly in the "Elon is a putz" camp, so if you are fan of Elon, the slant can be dealt with by just looking at the figures and not listening to the audio. The market for Starlink is a bit more than the US. CSS showed a map of the world colored in by average annual income. Any place outside of the 1st world cannot afford Starlink. It's unlikely they can afford a personal computer and many can't pay for a mobile. There's masses of old computers that people could be given for free, but they won't run an up to date OS and therefore can't run a version of internet software that will work. My old Mac Powerbook sits in a closet for that reason. Mainstream web sites won't work and there's no browser I've found that will help that. Mail is no problem and I'll likely find some use for it at some point.
The pitch that Elon is going to bring internet to the world's out of the way places isn't a total lie, but it's only going to to that for those that can already afford it. I've seen a few videos from people bumbling around the Outback using Starlink. Bully for them, but a satellite network ISP just for that is a waste. There are already providers if you're not playing Call of Duty and need sub-20ms ping times. Selling bandwidth to a military might be something that allows the rank and file to phone home, but no country in their right mind would outsource tactical comms to a private company. Cruise ships? After paying that sort of money you are going to sit somewhere and pull up Netflix? Again, there has already been internet via satellite and latency isn't a concern for the tour operator. Ship comms are going through a separate service. What really surprised me was how fast they got approvals for use on aircraft. Getting hardware certified to use on passenger aircraft is a Herculean task.
>Cruise ships?
From what I hear, cruise ships are indeed one of the biggest demands out there for mobile network bandwidth. With several thousand bored passengers (and, these days, crew) demanding Internet like that get at home, the comms hub on a cruise ship is a pretty major piece of engineering. And, so it is with the satellite. The problem with the LEOs is that you need an awful lot of them with that capability to provide permanent coverage of the ship, were as the corresponding GEO system needs only 1 of them.
>Selling bandwidth to a military might be something that allows the rank and file to phone home...
...which is pretty much what the military's commanders don't want their rank and file to be able to do from within a war zone! When not at war, generally they're on tap with civilian networks nearby anyway.
Military usage of bandwidth is probably quite light weight, really. They've long had to contend with minimal bandwidth and I guess they've become quite good at brevity; for example, the Royal Navy was perfectly capable of running a global navy prior to WW2 using nothing but Morse via HF, blinker lights, and sailors waving semaphore flags..
And, after all, one needs only 5 bytes to communicate, "Fire!".
>The pitch that Elon is going to bring internet to the world's out of the way places isn't a total lie, but it's only going to to that for those that can already afford it.
I think a lot can be learned from the history of Iridium. They set out to provide the world with 2G mobile satellite telephony. They failed, because by the time they got there everyone already had 2G. I can see why Elon is in a hurry because if they ambled into providing the full service there really won't be any market at all.
I'm quite interested at reports that SpaceX is considering floating StarLink as soon as it's stable with cash positive (which, they've recently claimed it sort of is). There's every possibility that they get it to some sort of profitable state, float it, and with a gentle foop! the market starts evaporating underneath them as cheaper-priced terrestrial comms spreads further and further. If that is their strategy, getting StarLink "finished" ASAP is necessary otherwise it might not achieve sufficient profitability for an IPO to yield a good result.
Sorry, mostly wrong. I’ll only deal with military bandwidth, shortage of time. Military use is rather heavy. Three big-ticket items really:
1) Crew calling. There are *a lot* of overseas service personnel, army and navy, and they all want to talk to their families over video, rather regularly. From platforms that by definition are mobile and not served by permanent infrastructure. Multiply it up, there’s a lot of bandwidth required.
2) Predator drones, basically. All served by nice fat video pipes. Oh, and by the way, if reaction time is important (which it is when you are controlling a vehicle remotely), the lag over LEO is much preferable to Geo
3) Reserved bandwidth for bigwigs. Historically, certain individuals expect to be able to communicate at *all* times, which requires bandwidth reservation for videoconf. Even when they aren’t active, the line is always open 24/7/365. The bill really adds up. This alone is a several hundred million dollar bill that I know about, and almost certainly 10x that I don’t. People just don’t appreciate just how large is the sheer spending power of US military.
"1) Crew calling. There are *a lot* of overseas service personnel, army and navy, and they all want to talk to their families over video, rather regularly. From platforms that by definition are mobile and not served by permanent infrastructure. Multiply it up, there’s a lot of bandwidth required."
Those service members are on base where there is likely already services. The last thing any commander would want is for troops to have comms home while out in the field. You say there is a lot of bandwidth required and Starlink can max out with a relatively small number of users (compared to terrestrial services). There could also be times when commanders would like to put a base on EMCON. It would get much more difficult to do with a bunch of Starlink terminals all over a base as opposed to a phat internet connection that can have a few different OFF switches.
"Buying a Falcon 9 launch costs about $70M because it would cost you more to buy from someone else - if they had a working rocket and would not just pinch your satellite. Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M. Add in $5M ish for a fairing full of Starlinks and multiply by 60ish launches per year gets you to $1.5B - near enough Starlink revenue for a back-of-envelope calculation."
Thanks, I hadn't realised the launches were that cheap nowadays.
"Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M"
The rocket engineers I used to work with estimate that the costs are closer to $40mn and more for relandable versions. The red tape is a significant cost center even when the fuel isn't. Gwynne is on record as promising launch PRICES getting down as low as $7mn/launch with reused cores. That's why people in the industry regard a lot of what she says as parroting what Elon wants out there rather than reality in this space/time. She's certainly not a "dumb blonde" (even thought the blonde comes from a bottle) and she has access to the honest accounting and should know better.
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In Spain it's a €580 set-up fee once you tick all the hardware boxes and then €74/month. There are few places which are so cut off that they require this outlay, and if they were you would probably club together with neighbours and go for a claimed 1TB connection which costs €217/month.
Also the Spanish-language text on their website looks like machine-translated garbage.
In 2022 they had €1.2m income, which a back-of-fag packet calculation tells me is between 1000-1500 customers in Spain.
Of course if anyone can sell this as a success, Musk can.
"Also the Spanish-language text on their website looks like machine-translated garbage."
Right?! That tells me a whole lot about a company when they don't hire a live person to "localize" a translation. While Spanish is spoken in many places around the world (wherever the Pope gave Spain the approval to conquer), it's not all the same. Neither is English, Portuguese, French... pretty much any broadly spoken language you care to name. There's a Russian sci-fi author that has a series whose story line I like but the translator (to English) is horrible. The idioms and aphorisms common in Russia don't always come out with the same flavor and need to be converted to those in use in the US/UK/etc. ex A straight translation might be "to my eye" and in the US it would be "the way I see it". That's an easy one, but illustrative of my point.
"I don't see how they could possibly be "cash positive" with all that historic debt still around the neck of Starlink. "
I can see how it might be possible for Starlink to be in the black today and still not be a viable business venture. There's still tens of thousands of satellites to launch if they are going to build out to their stated 42,000 constellation. Gwynne Shotwell said (on video) that the life of the satellites is estimated at 5 years. This means that the entire constellation will need new birds every 5 years. It's easy to see why Elon hopes to get Starship working (not blowing up) and able to carry many more of the bigger and heavier version sats on each launch. They need to average a launch cadence of 70 new satellites every three days for replacement in addition to getting the initial birds in place. This is also a continuous operation, not something that will every be finished. That's a lot of fuel, a lot of launch slots (Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg don't typically launch more than one rocket per day and since it's military/government, a few times a week is a major chore for them) and SpaceX has external paying customers to service as well. Even if Starlink can become profitable, can it be profitable enough that if it impedes on other launches, SpaceX as a whole isn't making less?
Let's say Starlink makes money and the spin it off as it's own thing. Go with me here... Does the new separate corporation pay SpaceX cost on launches every few days or will they have to start paying retail launch prices? Even after an IPO, Starlink would still be necessarily joined at the hip to SpaceX. Especially true of satellites are being launched on a new SpaceX heavy lift rocket, be it Starship or something else. Nobody else has a larger payload bay to stuff more Starlink satellites in. Falcon Heavy can lift the mass, but it doesn't have the cubic that gives it an advantage over the single core version. The cure could be a more capable satellite that's a similar size but more massive. If they could get 20 sats to take over for what it took 60 to do previously, the added mass could be carried by F9H. A comment I've see before on a rocket engineering forum asks the question why SpaceX isn't toying with a F9/Raptor variant or a Falcon XL/Raptor with a larger payload envelope since the Falcon system is working very well at this point.
I'd assume that Musk can spew out whatever self-aggrandizing shite he likes if the company he's boasting about is- and will remain- privately owned.
But if, as claimed, he's planning on taking it public in the near future, wouldn't such statements have legally-binding consequences in that context, even if the IPO hadn't been formally announced at the time they were made?
Wouldn't- at best- he be forced to formally rebut or clarify such claims if they were untrue? (*)
Not, of course, that Musk doesn't already have form in shooting his mouth off in a manner that *did* have legally-binding consequences, but with most people they'd have learned not to do that a second time. Then again, this *is* the wannabe-edgy, perma-adolescent manchild Elon Musk we're discussing here.
(*) Disclaimer; I'm not remotely an expert in this sort of thing, else I'd be giving the answer rather than asking the question.
Choose any period when they don't pay for a launch a rocket or take delivery of a satellite but do bill some customers then it is a cash positive period. What has gone before or yet to come doesn't affect that. It has nothing to do with profitability or asset value. We are nearly all cash positive on pay day no matter whether rich or in spiralling debt.
Argument was valid for a week because SpaceX average two launches per week. Argument was less valid for a quarter where you need to maintain a higher proportion of non-Starlink launches over a run of 25. That has already happened according to Shotwell - a far more reliable source than Musk. This article is about a Musk statement for the year. Reversion to the mean will not save you this time. Massively more likely that Musk is just lying, and I would go with that if SpaceX had split off Starlink and were advertising an IPO. This is journalists remembering old statements about when an IPO would suit SpaceX and noticing the conditions have just about been met.
"But if, as claimed, he's planning on taking it public in the near future, wouldn't such statements have legally-binding consequences in that context, even if the IPO hadn't been formally announced at the time they were made?"
SpaceX still has to raise hundreds of millions dollars every year to fund operations. If they were turning a profit, it would hard to understand why. If the company goes public, the Mars fantasy dies. There's no business case and a publicly traded company has to be run for the benefit of the shareholders and a massively expensive program with no realistic plan to earn a profit would put somebody in prison. There's also a board of directors to deal with, the extra costs to be traded on public markets, etc etc. Who thinks Elon wants to work with the SEC with a company he's been overlord of since inception. The "as claimed" is the usual speculation that always surrounds Elon. There are already so many things that he does talk about that I suppose one more that makes no sense is easy for somebody to believe, but is has be asked why he would take SpaceX public. They could raise a bunch of money, but the cost would be in a currency that Elon already has problems with.
There's a photographer I like on YouTube that presents mainly about the business of photography including all of the mistakes he's made along the way. One that he just talked about was how archaic the commercial product photography industry is with layers of ad agencies, agents, hangers on and all sorts of frustrating way things are done (business-wise). His bit of advice is, if you want to work as a commercial photographer, suck it up and just deal with it, you aren't going to be able to change it no matter how you whinge. A lot of what Elon has done is not do things to match how the real world works. The launch tower in Boca Chica isn't permitted. Getting permits to build such a structure in the midst of several nature preserves would have been onerous so he didn't and claimed it was just an "integration tower", not a launch tower. The rocket bidet he hopes prevents destroying the launch mount again is "not a deluge system" as building one of those would require working with the Army Corps of Engineers who had to notify SpaceX that they application was closed due to zero communications from the company. Toss in the "not a flamethrower, flamethrower" and you get how he's been allowed to operate thus far and why he tells everybody to push off and does what he likes. There will be a point where he hits the wall. Currently he's lobbying in the town center of X to cast hate towards the US Fish and Wildlife agency since they haven't signed off on another Starship launch (in the middle of all those nature preserves). The FWS may wind up having a backbone and little need to cater to Elon in the same way the FAA does. If they give a downcheck do to all of the promises SpaceX has already reneged on with regards to not polluting the area and cleaning up their mess when they do, it could mean a very long return to explo---, umm, flight, for Starship.
If Starlink had to pay full commercial rates for those Falcon 9 launches then it'd go bankrupt immediately.
It only works because the launches are incredibly cheap, by using hardware and slots that nobody else has bought - and also acting as an advertisement and launch vehicle testing.
There is however a rather large market they've barely touched (and deliberately ignored to begin with) - ships.
Having reasonably fast Internet access on board ship is extremely valuable to the crew, and quite valuable to the operators as they get more information about WTF the ship is doing and can take fewer risks - physically and financially.
https://www.starlink.com/business/maritime.
They took the low hanging fruit first, brought in step ladders some time ago and are moving on to cherry pickers. By the time Amazon has an operational system they will find Starlink at every profitable level of the market. That will not stop Jeff. He will shovel cash into a furnace for a decade to take control of a large market.
>"That will not stop Jeff. He will shovel cash into a furnace for a decade to take control of a large market."
It will be interesting to see this tech play out. Bezos now has the original team of Starlink engineers working for him. They have continued to refine the antenna technology that Musk didn't want to wait for. Amazon may be able to competitively enter the marketplace quickly as they will be able to service more customers with significantly fewer satellites.
Starlink may have grabbed the first-to-market advantage. However with fewer birds required, Amazon could become the satellite broadband powerhouse in a decade when Starlink's current constellations have aged out and been de-orbited.
To the topic of this article.... This means position Starlink today for an IPO, cash in the chips, and let someone else deal with the eventual competition.
Bezo has to reach orbit first...
23 years in and just 22 low suborbital flights later, BO is in serious risk of losing its sat licence.
1618 Sats need to be in orbit by 30 July 2026. Just 32 months left. All three contracted rockets to fly these sats have ZERO launches to date and zero launches scheduled for this year. All rely upon Bezos un-flown engine.
Its still doable, but its getting into the ridiculous fantasy land where every single launch has to go as planned with zero additional delays. A single crash/failure of any of the three brand new rockets would spell disaster for Kuiper.
"I'm guessing the satellite tracking stuff on their dish is a bit more challenging on a moving vehicle than on a stationary rooftop?"
It's pretty good. A ship isn't moving that fast even in heavy seas for the antenna to not be able to track fast enough except in extreme circumstances (very few sats visible, low angle).
A race truck in the Baja Rally isn't going to stay locked nor a missile. Passenger aircraft are lumbering beasts where a fighter jet isn't.
None of that is to say that if there was an application that needed super fast tracking that it couldn't be done. I expect the hardware would be much more expensive and the dishes much larger to accommodate more cells.
Obviously it is doable, because they have now done it.
My point it is that I'm guessing it would have taken them a bit more work vs a stationary rooftop, and they would want to get the rooftop working first, then add the additional stuff required when both ends of the communication link are moving objects.
"It only works because the launches are incredibly cheap, by using hardware and slots that nobody else has bought"
The hardcore fans are spewing all sorts of positive, glowing praise for all of those launches and how SpaceX has launched more rockets in the last year than anybody else. They've launched more kgs than anybody else, more cubic, moar. The also go one step further and claim that SX is more profitable than any other launch provider and nobody else is supplying ISS (Northrup Grumman, JAXA, Russia must have all gone out of business). When it's pointed out that the vast majority of what they are doing is Starlink, that's just being a hater (guilty, but not just to hate). If I've made the comment, I'm also shorting Tesla stock, anti-American (they don't know where I am) and know absolutely nothing about rockets. I sort of want to post a photo in defense, but then again I suspect it would be a very bad idea.
"Having reasonably fast Internet access on board ship is extremely valuable to the crew, and quite valuable to the operators as they get more information about WTF the ship is doing and can take fewer risks - physically and financially.
The operators don't give a toss about most of the crew. I looked into working as an AV tech on cruises some years ago and ... no thanks. There are plenty of people that have YouTube channels where they talk about what it's like and bandwidth is something you can burn what's left of you pay buying after you've settled up at the crew bar. The ships already have comms via providers that specialize in that service and things like location, ship status (fire/flood alarms) and engine performance are already taken care of. There's instant point to point comms available between the ships and offices all over the world that don't go through something as dodgy as the internet. You'd be right in thinking they don't want to rely on a system that could be hacked by somebody on the ship. The comms they have could be compromised, but it would take physical access and specialized knowledge.
Cruise liners are very visible, but there aren't many of them.
Merchant shipping generally only has ship to ship radio providing voice or telefax, nothing you'd consider a data connection connection at all (Internet or no)
Ports tend to offer wifi to crews and ship operators for personal, business and navigation use - like updating electronic charts.
There have been many incidents that could have been avoided by providing Internet access to the crew - several quite infamous groundings happened entirely because they sailed close to shore trying to get cellphone service.
"several quite infamous groundings happened entirely because they sailed close to shore trying to get cellphone service."
I would have rigged a phone with an external and highly directional antenna rather than risk a grounding. It makes it hard to put the phone in your pocket, but that's where removable SIM cards are a good thing. There are even cell repeaters for people that are on the fringes so they can access a network.
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