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In Australia, it's $140 / month, plus the capex of $700 for the dish, which obviously won't work on any other provider. I suspect resale on that device, if the
by Jedd 5y ago
In Australia, it's $140 / month, plus the capex of $700 for the dish, which obviously won't work on any other provider. I suspect resale on that device, if the carrier allows it, would be reasonable, but I don't expect I'd be moving away from this service.
People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that terrestrial services there are better spec'd and cheaper.
For me (in AU) it's compelling because I otherwise have an option of a 3G yagi / booster (nearest tower is 15km away, service is awful normally, but unusable in storms, frequently highly contended, etc), dial-up (there's very few places that still offer such a service, and just the landline connection fee is $40 / month to start with), or geo-stationary satellite (what I've just moved away from after 2+ years, which has > 600ms RTT to the nearest capital city, and a max downstream of 25Mbps, which is also frequently highly contended during peak times.
The 100W / hour usage is frustrating, and claims of electricity being 'just 10c / kWh' are quaint, I guess coming from well serviced parts of EU / US? Here most people are up for 30c (AUD) / kWh, and if on ToU that can go up to 60c during peak (2pm through 8pm). I've got solar, so on average I'm powering this 'for free' 25% of the time.
- walrus01 5y agorough calculation in US dollars, if a starlink terminal is 100W constant load and electricity costs $0.30 per kWh, it would be about a $22.32 extra on the monthly electrical bill. in your case about $16.74 if you subtract 25% for the estimate of benefit from your solar (grid tied?) kWh going back to the grid
- Jedd 5y agoThat sounds about right. For the average Australian user, it means you add ~ $200-350 / year to your effective ISP cost. Not end of world for most, but certainly not trivial for all, either. The regrettable history of Australian internet provisioning (specifically our national broadband network) and electricity pricing (specifically the rorts and corruption, and higher-than-rest-of-world pricing) are described much more eloquently by others.
- djtango 5y ago>but unusable in storms Dumb Q - is satellite any better in a storm?
- MobiusHorizons 5y agoI would guess there is less interference between a ground station and a satellite than between two ground stations. Two main reasons: 1) The storm would have to be right on top of the ground station to be in the line of sight when talking to a satellite. For the 3g case, the storm could be anywhere along the 15km between the two ground stations. 2) Storms typically cover a larger area horizontally than they do vertically, so for most angles, communicating with a satellite should go through less of the cloud than horizontal 3g communication. I'm sure there could be storms where this is not true (eg a tall thunderstorm directly above the ground station), but my guess is that such storms are more rare.
- chris1993 5y agoStorms, and just heavy rain, consistently send our satellite internet offline. This is Australian “sky muster plus” pointing at a geosynchronous satellite at a higher orbit than starlink.
- Jedd 5y agoTo augment the other two responses here with some anecdata -- yes, storms would knock off my geostationary satellite connection in ways I didn't fully understand (it might just have been a huge bump in attempted utilisation for all I could tell at the consumer level). Starlink during storms, and we've have a half dozen big ones since I got this service 4 months ago, seems to do more re-acquires during those events (several seconds of drop-outs) but I'm not seeing significantly lengthy outages. The dish is still sitting on some concrete blocks on the ground, so it may simply be that it's wobbling more during the wilder winds.