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Starlink is reducing your monthly service fee
I've just received a very pleasant surprise in email. Subscription in the UK was £89 per calendar month:
Effective 24/08/2022, Starlink is reducing your monthly service fee to £75.
The price reduction factors in your local market conditions and is meant to reflect parity in purchasing power across our customers.
No action is needed from you, the price reduction will be automatically reflected on invoices generated after 24/08/2022.
Thank you for being an early customer and for your continued support of Starlink!
- gitgud 4y agoI have never seen a company inform all users that they will automatically pay less for the same service...
- timbit42 4y agoCanadian ISP TekSavvy has done this numerous times. They don't offer satellite internet though.
- thenickdude 4y agoAWS does this periodically for storage and bandwidth pricing
- ohiovr 4y agoI got fiber installed last week! WOOT
- comboy 4y agoIn Poland it went from 449zl down to 230zl ($48). Impressive.
- andrew_lvov 4y agoIn Ukraine it went down to $60. Looks like we're richer than you at this moment :-D
- rasz 4y agoProbably because majority (out of 12K?) of terminals were financed by State Department (usaid)
- badpun 4y agoWow, that's great. As a Pole considering GTFO of the city and into the super rural area with no fiber and probably poor-to-no 4G coverage, that's great news. However, I'm a bit hestitant at the moment betting my life (can't/won't live without Internet) on Elon's side project.
- tyingq 4y agoAdjustment for the pound falling versus the dollar I guess?
- Danieru 4y agoThat would justify an increase. Instead Starlink is thus charging much less now than when the Pound was stronger.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoThe rate reduction is being applied across several currencies and their associated geographies, globally. Probably unrelated, StarLink and T-Mobile are announcing a partnership agreement tomorrow. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1562477813613047811 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1562477813613047811
- tjpnz 4y agoCost of living crisis might get some of their customers to look at competing options a few months from now when energy bills really start to bite.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoWhat about in US?
- huevosabio 4y agoGot a similar email for my service in Mexico. Genuinely surprised and joyful with this company. Not only does it work with minimal effort almost anywhere but they also reduce prices without going through call center hell. No way Comcast or Telmex would do this.
- __sy__ 4y agoWhile on the topic of Starlink, I wanted to share this cool Youtube video [1] I watched tonight on how it works (PCBA design, beam forming, orbital velocity, up/downlink bandwidth as a result...etc). It's a bit long but has some good details! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&ab_channel=BranchEducation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&ab_channel=Branc...
- elaus 4y agoIncredibly interesting and very well made. Hit the sweet spot for me in regards of technical details.
- thinkingkong 4y agoDid any EU regulation or competiton get announced recently? Because it seems limited to that region, ironically.
- happyopossum 4y agoCommenters here from Brazil and Mexico would be surprised to hear of their recent additions the EU.
- gambiting 4y agoPeople in this thread are reporting the same in Mexico and Brazil, so I don't think you're right.
- mrtksn 4y agoProbably that's not the case, it looks like they introduced localised pricing similar to the one in the App Store(or Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.). If you think about it, their costs are fixed and they should optimize for revenue and the sweet spot for the num subscribers and price is different at every market.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> their costs are fixed Their costs are in dollars. Ceteris paribus, this is coming out of Starlink's margin. (They may also be anticipating a compensating bump in volumes. Or they found some cost savings.)
- mrtksn 4y agoIt doesn't matter in what currency their costs are, there is a curve of num_subscribers v.s. payment_per_subscriber and they need to be at the curve's maxima and that maxima would be different for each market depending on the purchasing power of the customers. I.e. you are better off if you to have 150 customers who pay 75GBP instead of having 100 who pay 89GBP. You already sent the satellites and you already employ the people who upkeep the infrastructure, so it doesn't matter what currency you use, you always want to have the greatest revenue.
- woliveirajr 4y agoBrazil: down from R$500 ($100) to R$230($46) Setup fee+hardware from $1000 to $400. Price of local fiber: $30 for 600Mb/s
- marcalc 4y agoThat's a nice reduction. Which provider gives 600mbps for $30 (usd?) in Br?
- woliveirajr 4y agoSeems to be the base price. Examples: https://liggavc.com.br https://liggavc.com.br --> 600Mbps / 30USD https://www.oi.com.br/internet https://www.oi.com.br/internet --> 500Mbps / 25USD https://www.net.com.br/ https://www.net.com.br/ --> 500 Mbps / 25USD
- unixhero 4y agoThe point is not to compete with fiber.
- jandrese 4y agoIf you have local fiber you should use that instead. You won't be sharing spectrum with everybody else in the area. Starlink is for people who are underserved by terrestrial broadband.
- yuppiepuppie 4y agoUh what? Starlink is for anyone who wants to buy it. I don’t think Elon would say that you shouldn’t use it, under any circumstance.
- mrjin 4y agoSure, you can buy it. But should you buy it? Especially when there are far better and much cheaper alternatives.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoThe comments here showering Starlink with praise, acting like they're doing this to be a Bro, are bizarre. Starlink didn't drop prices out of the goodness of their hearts. They dropped prices because they had to. Why is debatable, but signs point to the network crumbling apart, causing them to lose customers. It hasn't been able to scale to handle the customer load, even in rural areas: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-massive-growth-results-in-congestion-slow-speeds-for-some-users https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-massive-growth-results-... "Hundreds of miles south near Leonard, Texas, John Lawyer has encountered download rates on his Starlink dish that can dive as low as 1Mbps, especially during the evenings." That's a town of 2,000, in a county of 35,000. New customers are probably also put off by the signup costs and problems with "Dishy" - thermal shutdowns, a permanently attached cable for power/data, and being fairly fragile.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoUnscalable hype?
- ohiovr 4y agoHuges was probably great an eon ago.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoHughes was never and will never be able to be low latency with their current setup. You’re fighting against physics at that point due to the location of the satellites compared to Starlink. They also have always had exceptionally restrictive data caps. So I wouldn’t say they were ever “great”. Just realistic.
- ohiovr 4y agoGood to know. Geostationary latency is a bitch.
- ghaff 4y agoAnd data caps. Where my brother has a house in rural coastal Maine, the only two options further down his road (~1 Mbps DSL went as far as his house) were essentially Hughes or Verizon hotspot. Everyone who looked into it basically concluded that they were better than no Internet but you really couldn't do things like video streaming to any significant degree. Starlink is a game-changer for somewhere like this that had really marginal Internet and basically someone couldn't have worked from there. (People did go into the local small city and do Internet from the cafe or library but that obviously doesn't work for regular full-time work.)
- noncoml 4y agoI just hope they don’t go bankrupt. With 250,000 customers they are making at best $25m per year. Can see how that’s enough to sustain the whole thing.
- comboy 4y agoDeals with airlines and ships is what I assume is going to be 90% of the profit. Custom deals. Just a regular Starlink Maritime is $5k per month [1]. Military use cases alone could probably sustain it. 1. https://www.starlinkhardware.com/starlink-launches-maritime-service-tier/ https://www.starlinkhardware.com/starlink-launches-maritime-...
- lebski88 4y agoI think you forgot to * 12 for the months. 250,000 customers is approximately $300m a year. 250,000 * 100 dollars a month (approx - maybe less now) * 12
- spech 4y agoSames goes for Germany with 80€ and the German Telekom still isn't able to provide me a decent connection although fiber is installed in almost all adjacent streets...
- iam-TJ 4y agoI should have pointed out in the UK the cost includes 20% Value Added Tax (VAT) so the actual charge has reduced from £74.10 to £62.50 (US$87.44 to US$73.75 @ £1=US$1.18 on 2022-08-25).
- anelson 4y agoI got this too for my Starlink unit in Ukraine. Dropped to $60 from $100. A welcome change although I for some reason assumed it was specifically for Ukraine. Looks like it’s in a number of markets.
- jroesner 4y agoI can imagine there’s a direct connection to Apples announcement on Sep 7th. I don’t recall all the details, but read a report, that Apple bought a partially defunct satellite network, that has only very few, but therefore geostationary satellites which come with bandwidth licenses that exceed Starlink’s by a lot. Might be totally wrong, but did anybody else hear that rumor?
- Kye 4y agoThe latency is probably as bad as any other stationary satellite network. Apple might have bought it to ensure connectivity with its interests across the globe, not to productize it.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoThe latency will be bad unless they use faster than light communication.
- Kye 4y agoThis is in a context comparing them to satellites that fly low enough to get latencies comparable to terrestrial.
- guerby 4y agoIn France 100 EUR => 50 EUR too: https://www.phonandroid.com/starlink-divise-par-deux-le-prix-de-son-abonnement-en-france-il-passe-a-50e-par-mois.html https://www.phonandroid.com/starlink-divise-par-deux-le-prix...
- virtuallynathan 4y agoSpreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tuhyh6kbyDQ2D418ug_AgS1ZM_8MDDznrjWzDthU61w/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tuhyh6kbyDQ2D418ug_A...