(Credit: HughesNet)
Satellite internet provider HughesNet lost about 224,000 subscribers in 2023 amid the growing popularity of SpaceX's Starlink, its third consecutive year of losses, HughesNet parent EchoStar revealed in a Friday earnings call.
“Our consumer business under the HughesNet brand ended [2023] with approximately 1 million satellite broadband subscribers, down approximately 224,000 from 2022,” EchoStar COO Paul Gaske said during the call. In contrast, the business had 1.56 million customers in December 2020, two months after the launch of Starlink.
(Credit: HughesNet data)Starlink currently has over 2.2 million subscribers, of which 1.3 million are based in the US.
Although Starlink wasn’t directly named during the earnings call, Gaske blamed HughesNet's subscriber loss “primarily to our capacity limitations, competitive pressure and more selective customer screening as we focused on profitable subscribers.”
Gaske added that HughesNet is gradually shifting from a focus on consumer sales to enterprise customers, which has included selling satellite internet access to power in-flight Wi-Fi for Delta Airlines. “And we anticipate that in 2024, our enterprise revenues will surpass consumer revenues for the first time,” he added.
To compete with Starlink, the company launched a new Jupiter 3 satellite, which is designed to deliver download speeds up to 100Mbps. HughesNet began rolling out the upgraded speeds to subscribers in December, and "early feedback from customers is quite positive and will help us reverse the subscriber loss trend of 2023,” Gaske said.
Still, competition in the satellite internet space will only intensify. Later this year, SpaceX plans on launching a portable “mini” Starlink. Meanwhile, Amazon plans on beta-testing its own satellite internet system, Project Kuiper, in the second half of 2024.