A Starlink antenna costs $250 compared to the $25,000 price of a VSAT terminal a couple of years ago, KVH Industries CEO Brent Bruun said on the panel.
He said vessels can now get up to 200 megabits per second of service for about a dollar a gigabit, versus 20 Mbps on a typical VSAT for $10 per GB.
These orders of magnitude differences across three different metrics enable video calls and many other activities onboard a ship that used to be confined to land, significantly boosting ship operations and crew morale.
This is most likely just an error from a writer that doesn’t realize that Gb and GB refer to two different things. Or just a capitalization error.
To be honest the difference existing at all is infuriating.
If you find that infuriating, allow me to introduce you to the difference between gigabytes and gibibytes.
I’ve only known the “binary memory” version, eg. 1024 megabytes is 1 gigabyte is 1 gibibyte and little b meaning bits vs bytes (eg 1 bit vs 8 bits)