The first point I want to make is in terms of the equipment for which a customer needs to pay the one-time, upfront cost. We think we have a really clear path to driving that equipment price down. It's one of the hardest problems in these LEO systems, specifically those that go directly to consumers. You want to have tens of thousands of them at a low per-unit cost. We definitely have a path for that, again, both because of economies of scale and some future design developments.
I don't want to say much about where we think the price is going to go or how the service is going to evolve, because we are really genuinely taking feedback from these beta tests. I think we're going to really need to understand that better in terms of how actual customers use this and how we need to understand the management of the system and the flow of traffic that an increasing number of users have.
I do want to mention two quick things on cost. Obviously the expense of deploying the network is one important element. We are a privately held company. We aren't publicly traded. I want to clarify from Dan's comments about the $18-billion spectrum clearance in the U.S. That doesn't affect us. We aren't a previous operator of satellites. We don't operate and don't have any services in the frequency bands that have been cleared. I wanted to make sure that was evident.
One of the other big advantages we have is that it costs a certain amount of money to deploy a satellite, and because we have not only our own launch services available, we also have the advantage of the innovation of launch reusability. We're flying our satellites on rockets that have been used two, three, four, five times, which is unheard of in the deployment of commercial satellites. Coupled with the innovations in the satellite design, this all brings a more affordable deployment of the space architecture at the same time that we're driving down very hard on the equipment price past this early adopter first beta test.