I live in a rural area. We were thinking about starlink a few years ago, then fiber came to our area. Thank goodness. We’ve literally had no issues, speeds are amazing, and no price hikes.
Fibre is racist and woke, that’s what tramp said at least.
Given his steady diet of hamberders, I’m sure he does think fiber is woke
Hahahah
He love the uneducated.
He sure do… I mean, this can come off as a elitist by saying this, but you have to remember, Yankees live in their own shit and piss. They choose to be ignorant. They choose to be unsophisticated. They choose to look stupid on the world stage. We have every bit that we need to have a great society. We are a nation of idolaters. We worship idols. We are a nation of cults, just like an empire. Empires are filled with cults. We are an empty vessel of lesser things. A pit of despair for some. A Nation of extremes, peaks and valleys of exponential excrement.
I’m super jealous. I’m out here in Western Maryland and I’d be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.
Imagine paying for data caps for home internet.
No thank you. I’d take DSL over that if I was rural
Ah, so this is why Elon wanted the rural Internet bill killed.
Why provide a public service when some capitalist can squeeze every penny from that same service?
Well, we’ll provide the service once we buy it from them because they ran it into the ground as a vulture capital operation, and then once we’ve invested a trillion taxpayer dollars into fixing it up, we’ll sell it back to them for pennies.
It’s got to work this time!
And this is why capitalism utterly sucks at providing public services.
It’s not really capitalism anymore if the CEO runs the government too.
Idk what else the USA has to do to show the obvious oligarchy y’all have.
Even if the politicos unironically started referring to themselves as oligarchs, a significant population of US citizens would likely either take it as a joke and hand-wave it away, or take it as further proof that that’s just what you do to get ahead.
“Radical feminists” on tumblr are calling themselves fascists because they are happy with the porn ban.
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
你会写英语，不懂英语。
Huh. Aneurysms that make you write in Google-translated other languages. Cool.
你也不懂汉语？你的名字是”张殿李”？你说不说汉语？你是中国人吗？
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
You want to see rampant anti-male gender bigotry in play? Bring up - and be in favour of - “paper abortions”, and watch the hate flow.
Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely in favour of giving women abortion rights. But giving rights to only one gender and blatantly denying those exact same rights to the other is the dictionary definition of gender bigotry.
And while I may not want porn and smut to be trivially accessible to non-adults - and have absolutely no use for it, myself - I also wholeheartedly support the right of any legal adult to consume that content.
I think this anti-porn movement is just really Elon and billionaire funded Christian organizations covert woke attempt to keep the people breeding. He wants them desperate, bare-footed and pregnant. I’m all for the paper abortion. I’m adopted. The person that cares for you is the one that is your parent. In this day and age it requires a lot of mental strength to be a parent, especially on a shoestring budget. Some people with their magical thinking, their lack of mathematics and their hormones might poke a hole in the condom or stuff some of that cum right back into their body. There’s traps everywhere and it’s not just in relationships. I come from the crowd who would rather deal with feminism through the lens of gender studies where both sides are taken into account with the like a sprinkling of some sociology. Also, you know, America’s full of many cultures, so what I’m really looking for is just Government staying where government should be. Definitely a separation of church and state. I think Americans are not realizing that the powers at the top are doing what they did in other countries with religious extremism right back to their own Country, the USA. This is called the Imperial Boomerang.i feel like I’m running through the labyrinth as the minotaur is chasing me. What is down is up and what is up is down. People caught in faux paradoxes because they live in a vacuum. The billionaire is looking down on the unholy garden… People are not paying attention close enough to our social ills. One thing leads to another. There is a reason why things are the way they are.
I think this anti-porn movement is just really Elon and billionaire funded Christian organizations covert woke attempt to keep the people breeding.
The other part of this is control. The more unreasonable control by Big Gov that people have already accepted, the more additional control they will be willing to submit to.
It’s a litmus test, a part of a wedge designed to normalize authoritarianism and societal control so that “deviants” can be more easily identified for violent elimination/unaliving, and the population as a whole can be made to go in only those directions that those in power deem “acceptable”. The ultimate objective is to create a population where most if not all uncritically accept deeply invasive directives from above without question or objection.
And for the party of “muh rights”, it sure is wildly hypocritical for Republicans to want to control every consenting and private aspect of people’s sexual lives.
You want to see rampant anti-male gender bigotry in play? Bring up - and be in favour of - “paper abortions”, and watch the hate flow.
Oh, wow… That’s some alpha bro shit right there. You deserve whatever hate comes your way for that.
Oh, wow.… That’s some alpha bro shit right there. You deserve whatever hate comes your way for that.
Ah, another gender bigot, I see.
So tell me, why should one gender be absolutely denied what the other gender is fully allowed to do? Especially when - aside from the current lack of artificial wombs - BOTH genders could have the exact same rights?
Explain it to me in a way that doesn’t have you come across as a supremely bigoted female supremacist.
Explain it to me
Aren’t we entitled? No. Go away.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability *to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to*. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.
Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.
Imagine being someone so bereft of any viable counter-argument, that the only possible response is an ad hominem.
And receiving ad hominems is a great way to identify intellectual bankruptcies in others. When the puerile and solipsistic insults come out, you know you’ve gotten under their skin in ways they have no rational or logical adult-level responses for.
CEO running the government is late stage capitalism.
Simply put.
Capitalism is antithetical to public services, at least according to Milton Friedman.
monopolism* utterly sucks at providing public services (except for some governmental monopolies because those can be democratically controlled)
once the starlink monopoly is broken this will happen less and less because if they raise prices the customers can switch to a different system from another company and spacex will lose money.
Not even a flat rate for that money
The former $240/mo was not outrageous to begin with?…
These Elon fanboys just love getting scammed by him. I can almost hear the little pay piggies squealing now.
I looked into Starlink years ago when I was RVing. It came out to over $600 up front in equipment costs, THEN $240 a month or w/e. And it’s not like Elon wasn’t a piece of shit back then, either. $50 a month for T-Mobile “5G at home” with no upfront or hidden costs did the trick nicely and bridged the gap until I found a place with cheap fiber. Now I have 2.5Gbps up and down and it’s still less than half the price of Starlink before this price hike.
It’s worth it.
If you’re in the middle of the Pacific often.
Yeah, but the 5000 people that applies to can’t afford the entire network.
I’ve heard it also works well to put pressure on rural Alaskan GCI (the scam that is 0.25¢/GB).
Starlink makes sense for the scenario it was designed fill the gap for. A lack of any other terrestrial options.
Legacy satellite has always been terrible, but the only option in many rural areas, and obviously the middle of nowhere. Starlink is an insanely reliable and decent deal in most of those circumstances. That’s it’s bread and butter.
But if you have literally any other option, it’s usually not the best choice, it’s not meant to be the best choice, it’s intended for use where it’s likely the only choice.
One of my brothers is in Alaska right now. It’s wild to me that he even gets internet where he’s at. Where he’s at they don’t even have mailboxes just PO Boxes.
He is sharing 1TB a month among ~60 people tho
Like it or not, it’s the only option for high speed internet for large swaths of the world. ViaSat is the only competitor and they’re even worse: slower, unusably high latency and ridiculously low data caps.
I cant speak for other countries, but in the US, we are spending hundreds of dollars a month per household in these areas to the richest man in the world for shitty internet service instead of EITHER holding ISPs to the contracts they agreed to when municipalities gave then the right to build without competition from public services for which they were meant to supply high speed wired services to everyone, OR throw those contracts away and build reliable and profitable public services anyway and fuck the useless ISPs over. Instead we are just inviting in another ISP to fill the gap, this one also a racist fascist who is littering space with unregulated junk.
But for those large parts of the world, 240 USD per month is even more ridiculous
I haven’t looked at the FCC map but I bet Starlink takes Last Mile credit for everywhere.
So every tax payer pays Starlink plus tax payers that are their customers pay Starlink a second time with these high prices.
I know one guy where he’s just on a damn mountain. Not many other options.
Not saying it’s the option I’d take, just saying. If you’re in the sticks in a red state…
Yeah there are always exceptions of course. I’ve seen some in that position able to get away with direct line-of-sight connections for a reasonable rate, but it depends heavily on the layout of the surrounding mountains and location of the service provider plus you have to shell out for an antennae or dish. For any wondering, that’s almost always cheaper than the Starlink sign up costs.
Then again, if internet is important to someone, gotta consider if mountain-side living is the right choice to begin with. I’m sure your acquaintance has his reasons though!
I wouldn’t use this service unless I literally had no other option. But sadly “no other option” is why they are able to jack up the prices and change the terms and conditions as they feel like with impunity.
What’s worse is, because it’s an option. The work that was being done for other reliable works will be put on indefinite hold. Musk monopolized our orbit. He needs to be brought before an effective tribunal and have his decision scrutinized harshly. I know, I know. “But he won’t”. If everyone had that attitude we would still be riding horses so help or shut up.
Yup, were i live it’s not even that rural but I only have 1 option and it’s basically double the price it should be if I was in a competitive market… 300 down 30 up for $100.
Yep. Got one for my mother who lives in remote Jamaica so we could check on her after hurricanes.
im not gonna lie. I halluecenated. and thought the title said “let them eat shit”
seems appropriate, still
I am unsurprised. I thought it would take longer for it to become outrageously priced, but here we are. this specific pricing is extra crazy IMO.
In any case, I scoffed at the pricing when it was almost reasonable during their trial phases… Back then IIRC it was like $100-150 usd/mo. or something… That’s too much for me already. Seems like they’ve previously increased it to around $200-300 and now they’ve lost their damn minds.
Star link was never economically sensible, price hikes were inevitable. There’s just too few people in their target audience and too many satellites that are simply too costly to maintain at the levels they previously had. I hoped, for the sake of anyone who required starlink for a reasonable Internet connection speed, that the business plans and corporate users would shoulder most of the cost, but here we are.
I think it’s between $120 a month for home use and $165 a month for RV / travel use.
You get what you fucking deserve when you lie down with vermin like Musk. Fuck this space-based nazi isp.
I’m one of those people for who Starlink very much is the only option. I moved from Northern Virginia to Western Maryland. This land used to be state park and all it has is electricity and mail delivery. No water, no sewage, no telephone, no internet other than cell hotspot or Starlink. It sucks but I have to try and separate my distaste for Musk with the engineers and people who actually run Starlink day to day, because at the end of the day the service is pretty damn good. The only issue I have (besides the price) is with VoIP traffic; but SIP acts fucky even with Cat5/6 sometimes so idk. I looked up the current policy and at least in the US they do not have a soft data cap. They did when the service initially launched AFAIK but that’s been replaced with a more general “network management” policy (throttling, etc) . https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90?regionCode=US
Just gonna let you know, if ya have 5g available more specifically T-Mobile then ya can get an at home 5g router. It is most definitely cheaper and may have lower latency, though I don’t know how their network is on the East coast furthest east I’ve gone is Utah.
T Mobile is amazing on the east coast.
I often find situations where I have service when my partner in Verizon does not.
I really miss t-mob from living in northern virginia. I’m up in the Appalachian mountains tucked between two peaks. There was a plan at one time to utilize the old 800mhz band for some sort of municipal internet (since 800mhz can either punch through the rock or “ride” along the earth, been too long since RF school to remember). But as far as I know nothing ever came of it.
Unfortunately we only get AT&T and maybe a whiff of T-Mobile once in a blue moon. Gotta go a few miles into town to get reliable service, especially if you want 5G. Thanks though.
So this is what I did for a long time at my folks place out in the boonies.
- Get yourself another line with unlimited data.
- Buy yourself one of these: GL.iNet GL-MT3000 or GL.iNet GL-AX1800
- Connect the phone to the USB slot.
- Turn on the phone’s USB tethering option.
- Go into the router’s admin page and tell it to use USB tethering as the WAN option.
I do this with the same router when there are internet outages (thanks Cablevision).
It works great to get everyone in the house happy.
Hows that work if there is no signal?
OP states the get AT&T signal. You live out in the country, you have to get creative. Find the spot where signal is strong, plop your phone there. Mine at the time hung in front of a window.
Unfortunately, for me the spot where the signal is strong is ~250 feet up on top of a mountain. We had a cell booster that worked great on 3G but I’m not real keen on spending another $150 on a new repeater that may or may not pick up a signal from our roof. Another fun aspect of being out in the country is that I’m living in a converted pole barn which has a metal “skin” with double layer mylar foil/foam insulation that makes it quite difficult for signals to get inside. There’s no mesh so it’s not a full Faraday cage but it creates a lot of attenuation.
The AT&T hotspot is actually data capped, higher ping, and quite slow since we only have HSPA+ (4G) way out here. We used a hotspot while we were on the wait list for Starlink and just knowing there was a data cap made it pretty unpleasant to use. I should have specified that in the original post.
We’re having a pretty nasty thunderstorm right now and it barely misses a beat. I swear I’m not a musk shill lol, I just remember 3G hotspots and how much worse this would have been.
I like a little bit of chaos and uncertainty, rather than allowing a billionaire to price gouge me. To each their own though, I suppose. But the problem is, if one guy does something, then that means the other guy down the street’s gonna have to do it or go out of business. I need the herd to pay attention.
Also don’t hack me plz
Yep, Starlink is the only internet that works out here. In WV, can confirm.
Damn, maybe you should move to a radical leftist city where fiber internet is $50 a month.
Try 10€.
Where?
Romania probably.
They went hard on fiber investments a decade or two ago and now they have some of the world’s best internet.
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
Best place in the world to acquire porn: it’s made there (farm to table), and you can download it nigh instantly
Do they have porn markets like farmer markets?
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
then it would be €1200 for a TB (assuming the price goes up linearly), so not cheaper than starlink
10 Gbit as in speed, not data cap. In Europe (at least in most places afaik) we don’t have data caps on fiber.
So no, not even close.Then you should write Gbit/s or Gbps, not just Gbit
Also I live in Europe and my internet is capped at 50 GB and the max speed is 30 Mbps, so 10 Gbps is baffling to me.
Also in Europe (Germany). A cap to home Internet is kinda crazy to me. I don’t measure my usage, but when I did, I usually used about 2-3tb per month.
I have 1gbps down/300mbps up for 50€. Price is shit compared to other parts of Europe, but I can live with it.
I think you’re misreading that as “10 GB of data,” when it’s actually download speeds of 10Gb/s. I looked it up, and there doesn’t seem to be a data cap.
So it’s quite a bit cheaper than Starlink.
I’m not misreading. The comment clearly says 10 Gbit, not 10 Gb/s
While you are technically correct, gigabit almost universally refers to speeds, and not size. You can probably blame the ISPs for that, since they love to advertise “gigabit service” and drop the bit about “per second.”
We pay 4.58€ for 1gbit/1gbit fiber in our condo association in Sweden…
If only I could immigrate. Know any single swedes looking for a spouse?
Whatcha got to offer? Gotta sweeten that pot, or you’ll lose to other bidders.
how is this better? the twitter guy is ordering a TB not a GB
That gigabit per second, without any datacap.
Twitter guy is ordering 1000 gigabyte worth of data, or slightly over 2 hours of internet in Sweden at full speed.
why is everyone dropping the “per second” part
Because gigabytes (GB) are units of storage capacity, and gigabits (Gb) are units of data transfer rate.
It’s implied it’s gigabits per second, as no one ever really measures it in like… Gigabits per hour, or year.
Radical leftist city.
Also, I’d just like to say that even 240 is expensive as hell.
For mobile satellite internet, it’s an absolute steal. If that’s what they had.
I pay €18 for 250/100, of course unlimited data, and the company has no tracking and fully supports privacy etc. their main servers are based in the old cave where the pirate bay used to have theirs. It also comes with a great VPN, ID security and antivirus from f-secure (not that I use it since I’m on linux). And they just opened a datacenter inside an old war bunker in my city, with this description: “Freedom of communication and the virtual world need to withstand both Russian bombs and Donald Trump’s Cloud Act. This industrial bunker is built for just that.” In Sweden, if you hadn’t guessed.
Flat fee of ~€70 to connect and then free for as long as I live in this apartment. 1000/1000 speeds as well, pretty sick honestly
13-18€ for 1gig/1gig in Copenhagen is the going rate
Sad German noises :/
40€ for 250M over cable here. At least I don’t have issues with congestion/slowdown in the evening, which is a common downside of cable.
Sad German noises, never mind those, sad USA noises because yours is still better than ours.
Us lucky fiber users, I can get 8gig symmetrical for $300 and 2 gig for $75 a month. Still nothing like other non American countries but damn do I have it good for living here.
I thought starlink was just an alibi company to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, and make SpaceX appear profitable on paper?
Starlink is owned by spaceX so they’ve never purchased a rocket, they just launch
And because of starlink SpaceX will be an insanely profitable company. Starlink is already bankrolling the very expensive starship development.
Who’s bankrolling starlink?
With xAI buying twitter and Tesla buying solarcity, Musk seems like he’s playing the walnut/pea game.
The original goal was that Starlink would be SpaceX’s cash cow. The demand for rocket launches is growing, but it can only grow so fast. If you’ve built the capability to launch so many satellites that you can’t find enough customers for all your launches, one option is to simply find ways to launch your own revenue-generating payloads into orbit. That was the original goal of Starlink, though it seems to be failing at that goal.
You are 100% correct except for
though it seems to be failing at that goal.
Starlink is expected to bring in 2 billion In profit this year, it is successful https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growing-rapidly-as-it-faces-a-moment-of-promise-and-peril/
And they basically destroyed the business model of all other spacecraft manufacturers, which relied heavily on the geostationary telecom market.
Starlink is bankrolling starlink, it’s expected to generate 12 billion In revenue this year with 2 billion of that being profit
Before it paid for itself spacex did and still does have a lot of very wealthy private investors willing to throw significant funds at the company
Then what, are you going to tell us next that going to Mars also was? Come on! /s
Leopards ate his… internet?
I only have this to say: Fuck the sky pollution. Starlink has been ruining stargazing and star photography and Elon lied about its impact. He claimed they would be invisible with his amazing paint but they’re still visible and fuck it up for people who enjoy watching the stars.
I see them all the time without a camera. They are bright as the stars when they pass over.
pros and cons…
pros:
- internet in remote places
cons:
- at the cost of literallt everything else
If you think ruining stargazing is the biggest problem, don’t look up Satellite Collision Cascades
The fucking muskrat is going to lock us down to Earth and make launches too dangerous due to debris fields
And all of you are just complaining about artificial light
Well I don’t see myself going to space any time soon. But I do see myself watching the nightsky a lot.
You’re right though. It’s another thing he doesn’t care about.
It’s important that we think of future generations, statistically this cascade could easily happen in our lifetimes
They are low enough that it’d probably fix itself over time. It’d be a big problem, but I feel comming generations have bigger ones.
Ok well I have aerospace engineering friends that disagree, and if those quiet mousy guys are panicking then I think they may be on to something
Oh, I mean, it would be bad, even if it “just” meant no/unsafe launches and no LEO for X months/years. I just kinda feels it pales compared to the climate related problems coming generations are likely to face.
… an ablative cascade would destroy nearly every satellite and would render ALL launches russian roulette with 5 chambers filled, and it would last for centuries.
I really have no idea where you are getting your numbers from but there’s ALREADY enough high velocity mass to make LEO a minefield for generations and we’re not stopping launching.
Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit and deorbit naturally after a few years because of the small amounts of escaping atmosphere slowing them down. A collision cascade can’t really happen because it’s a fundamentally decaying orbit.
At least, there’s no risk of lasting orbital debris, at the cost of the satellites having a much shorter lifespan.
I have aerospace engineering friends that disagree, but I’m sure your wikipedia university degree is useful somewhere
Ablative cascades have more than enough energy to kick debris fields up orbit as impact velocities can hit 10 kilometers a second
JSYK that kind of energy can punch a paint flake through a quarter inch of titanium
… Well, fortunately, I don’t manage satellite deployments, but your friends are welcome to tell NASA that their aerospace engineers are actually wrong and need to stop SpaceX before they ground humanity. I’m sure they would love to hear it.
The fucking NASA scientist that came up with this scenario is Donald Kessler, it is literally named after him
They have been warning about this since before you were born.
Why are you so fundamentally resistant to truth?
Really playing to your username, eh. I am familiar with Kessler Syndrome. You’ll note that the most important aspect of said event, is the height, at which objects orbit, as that determines how long it takes for it to deorbit. The level of risk declines precipitously the closer to the earth the orbit is, and even if there was a catastrophic cascade at the height Starlink orbits, it would clear after a few years at most.
Impact ejection can cause eccentric orbits, but at that height, those deorbit even faster.
Fortunately, the very clever scientists at NASA have long since determined that there is essentially no risk from Starlink and similar satellite constellations, because they’ve been paying attention to this since before I was born.
Fortunately, the very clever scientists at NASA have long since determined that there is essentially no risk from Starlink and similar satellite constellations,
That is patently not true to the point that it is effectively a lie
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nasa-starlink-warning
This entire discussion you have been intellectually dishonest and using propaganda talking points. You are no longer welcome on my internet.
Starlink was never a viable business prospect. It never will be. Anybody who signed up to Starlink was just waiting for this to happen without knowing it.
I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
That, and as they burn up upon re-entry, they’re fucking up the environment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-damage-earth-atmosphere
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
I mean, the need for internet satellite is mostly in low density areas. In big cities fiber will always be cheaper and more reliable (except maybe in the US where operators are allowed to fuck you). I hate Musk and I guess Starlink is squeezing their monopoly position right now, but I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).
To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.
I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.
Maybe a better answer is WiMax.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, the satellites do “reasonably” boost themselves, they have propulsion on board.
After 5 years yes they trash them, but that nots not cost prohibitive for SpaceX. Starlink is brining in a significant amount of money, and it doesn’t cost SpaceX all that much to launch a new batch to replace the old. You all seem to forget they are the cheapest and most impressive launch company to date.
What you and nobody else seems to understand is that every year SpaceX is launching more and more rockets and they will only continue to increase their launch cadence. In the next one or two years, they will start using Starship for Starlink launches, and that will significantly increase the amount of bandwidth they can add to the network per lanch.
I’m sure I’ll get hate because I’m defending an elon company but everyone here is plain wrong and just making shit up.
☝️ spitting facts. people love to hate, and complain about the “other side” being delusional. turns out, we ALL can be a little delusional.
Yep. Spitting facts like degenerative AI.
Hallucinated facts.
Not everyone needs super low latency. Satellite phones exist for a reason.
The number of people willing to put up with the round trip latency to GEO is relatively small. They would only do it if there’s no other option. There aren’t enough customers to justify the kind of mass deployment Starlink needs to be profitable.
You can put lots of sats in a low orbit and get low latency, but then they either need to be replaced every few years (the kind of capital expenditure that companies are allergic to in the long run) or self-boosting (expensive, and still eventually need to be replaced). You can put them in a higher orbit, but latency goes up noticeably, you need even more sats for coverage, and it’s more expensive to put them there. You can put them in GEO and use fewer sats, but latency goes through the roof. These are the options orbital mechanics and current technology allows.
If we had a space elevator or similarly cheap way to access space, then it becomes more viable. Note that while Falcon 9 and Starship potentially make it viable to build one of the space megastructure ideas that have been floating around for decades, it would also crater SpaceX’s business model. Chemical rockets would build their own demise (at least for launching from Earth, and there are probably better technologies for scooting around the solar system once you’re up there). Musk likely knows that and would fight it.
Or you can build fiber to peoples homes and leave satellites for Antarctica or the Himalayas or such. That works, too.
Too many words. What did you want to say exactly?
Wonderful. They can just talk to their server on the phone
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting. Further, it will also be disadvantaged to anything closer with ability to choose a cable medium. All this adds up to the most expensive infrastructure that exclusively targets very low population density areas and/or areas too poor to afford good Internet. The people that could afford to sustain this can afford to move somewhere with a bit more infrastructure or at least within reach of a terrestrial tower and have an even better result.
That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)
So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.
But that’s not the only problem …
Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.
In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.
Starlink is not a viable business.
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting.
I mean…so what if the birds only last 5-7 years? My only real concern is that they’re not made with environmentally damaging materials. Let them fall over the South Pacific and be atomized on the way down. It really depends on how cheaply you can launch them. All infrastructure has a finite life span. 5-7 years is lower than most terrestrial infrastructure, but this is all a function of launch costs. If those can be made cheap enough, the concept is perfectly viable.
Closer to the latter than the former.
I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.
It is a viable business product, latest estimates are Starlink will bring in a revenue of 12 billion in 2025 with about 2 billion being profit. Of course it’s not a public company so we don’t get official numbers, but you’re flat out wrong.
It is absolutely not a viable business product. All those numbers don’t hold up to even a giggle test when you count the costs of launches alone, not to mention ground operations, etc. Currently Starlink is alive only because of subsidies on these items. When (not if) the subsidies end, Starlink will return to losing hundreds of dollars on every terminal sold.
The fact that prices are jumping up now already kind of hints that it’s entering a sales death spiral. Costs go up. Customers go down. Income goes down. Costs go up. Etc. etc. etc.
Starlink is a failure as a business, and as is usual for a Kaptain Ketamine company the “numbers” they cite range misdirection to flat-out fiction.
You keep showing how you don’t know anything about this, there are no subsidies on these items. Starlink is owned by SpaceX, so it is essentially free to launch besides the fuel it costs to launch. They are going to spend the money on operations, no matter what. If you want to call that a subsidy fine, but it’s a subsidy that’s never going away.
Secondly, prices have not gone up for the most popular plan that normal folks have. Prices were only raised for customers that do not have a fixed location, such as people who use their dish on a boat or RV.
Third, It’s funny how confident you are when the fact is that this is such a good business model that other companies are desperately trying to fill the space as competitors.
Amazon’s Kupier just starter launching their network, and have significantly greater launch costs than starlink because they do not own the launch vehicles, still Kupier will print money for Amazon in 10 years. You are talking out of your ass.
I see you responding to many of my comments, it shows you are unreasonably upset about something that shouldn’t upset you. Yes Elon musk is a horrible person that will hopefully die soon, doesn’t change the fact SpaceX and Starlink are both incredibly successful and will continue to be in the future.
Also last I read the cost to manufacture a terminal was now lower than the cost they sell them at, and that will continue to drop as production scales up (because there is significant demand despite what you may believe)
You’ve got your head so firmly placed up your ass you’ve adapted to breathing methane directly.
When it’s all finished, and operating, that’s when the next Democratic government should take it from him. One person, especially one demonstrated to be mentally unstable, should not control the world’s Internet.
