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So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates. This is good news and

So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates. This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.

Gigachad 4y ago
If the area is that congested, it's probably in need of wired connections. All the customers suddenly leaving might push ISPs to upgrade their offerings in these areas rather than seeing the customers as a captive audience.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I'd love to believe that, but having seen my parents own street overlooked by cable providers for two decades despite the fact that it's no longer rural and surrounded by tens of thousands of suburban households that have mowed down all the orange groves and cow pastures, they still do not have cable internet as an option in 2023.
  - brokenkebaby 4y ago
    This is a strong indicator that existing providers enjoy artificially limited competition, i.e. licensing/regulations need to be revised
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Sometimes it is purely a cost / benefit tradeoff analysis. The cable company even if a local monopoly should want my business. Although I suspect the local cable company did the original analysis back in the 90s and never factored for 25+ years of reliable revenue. And every year since some bean counter has looked at short term ROI. At any rate, I remember getting some relief when the first iPhone jailbreak was available and now for sure Starlink is a boon.
XorNot 4y ago
I mean...yes and no. Starlink is valuable provided it's cheap: above a certain price point, the number of applications drops off and there's no guarantee the remainder will represent enough to actually fund it.
- lazide 4y ago
  Compared to competitors, starlink is dirt cheap. Hughes has roughly 500ms ping times, and severe data caps, and was roughly that price.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Starlink actually seems underpriced to me. If the choice is Starlink, Hughes, maybe an equally barely-viable cellular hotspot, not everyone could afford $200-$300/month but a lot would.
capableweb 4y ago
The sentiment has been (up until this point?) that Starlink needs to lower costs for the customers, not increase them, as otherwise the customer base will remain as tiny as it currently is. Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the rest of the spare population?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  If Starship works out (and that's admittedly a big if), the price of launching Starlink satellites will plummet and they'll be able to boost the number of satellites in orbit from ~4k to 30k, which will improve bandwidth and cut costs. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configuration-for-second-gen-starlink/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu... Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm.
  - jlkuester7 4y ago
    > Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm. Made me laugh out loud! :) Closest wired internet to my place is 6mi South. Also have a big hill between me and the only fixed LOS internet tower in the area. Currently, Starlink is my only real option, and it has worked fine for me so far! In my experience, an ISP with no real competition is always going to be pricy. The only way to get reasonable rates is to have some competition....
  - codazoda 4y ago
    Funny story… Century Link got 500 feet of fiber pulled to my house, and I didn’t pay a dime. When they subdivided my neighborhood it was supposed to have fiber. All my neighbors had it, but not me. There’s supposed to be a major connection every other house, and mine should have it, but it doesn’t. The person at Century Link that came out to my place and found the problem pulled the original plans for the subdivision, figured out who screwed up, contacted that company, and got fiber to my place. They had to go 500 feet, under a street and two driveways. Now I have fiber. Thanks dude at Century Link. p.s. Comcast (Xfinity) came out and looked too. They noped the hell out right away.
spiantino 4y ago
That's a strange interpretation of a new upstart utility pricing itself out of competition.
ChatGTP 4y ago
What determines capacity isn't transparent. Also, yes it may get cheaper, but that’s not a given, if it doesn’t, what happens then?
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Price comes down when meaningful competition enters the space (see what I did there?) OneWeb seems about ready to start offering service. Remains to be seen if the offering can compete with starlink but good chance it will apply downward pressure to prices. Then in the medium distant future there is Amazon's constellation that will have to compete with starlink v3 or v4 or whatever they're up to by then.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    There's already plenty of competition going for the profitable market segments - I know of at least 4 LEO satellite ISPs that are currently operating aside from SpaceX. Residential ISP in space is not one of those by most good estimates of costs and prices. Even SpaceX themselves are saying this.
anaganisk 4y ago
This was probably what Iridium thought when they started their satellite based phone network.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Or it demonstrates it's an inefficient means to an end. Just because highways keep getting bigger doesn't mean it's the best mode of transport.
fomine3 4y ago
Here in Japan, Starlink price is continuously down (now $50) because only richer techy people (of course they have fiber and live in metropolis) buy it and they don't use much. FTTH coverage is really comprehensive even in very rural area, so there are very few residential practical use case. It would be excellent for camping. It seems that it practically priced.
- realusername 4y ago
  It's pretty much the same in France, standard internet cost is about 35€ and fiber is being deployed at record speed, I live in the countryside (real countryside, 50 inhabitants village) and I have access to fiber. I'm not sure starlink has a future in this kind of environment outside of niche applications. Their business model is difficult in my opinion, they both need a lot of customers from rich countries to recoup the costs but in the same time, the vast majority of those rich countries are well equipped already (or about to) since having a decent internet coverage is critical for their economies.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    It seems that Starlink works in places that fail to build either fiber or good 4G/5G coverage. But even there if the demand is too much they might not have capacity to provide good service. I don't believe it is viable model they are running.
    - realusername 4y ago
      Yeah that's clearly another issue on top, if there's a place where they have some demand, they'll have a lot of demand, it's an everything or nothing market.
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      Also, if such an area exists, and there are enough people willing to pay $100/month to congest starlink, then it probably makes sense for someone to set up a WISP, which will be able to provide a better service. In fact, if this isn't happening at scale already, I would expect that some WISP companies will start using starlink congestion areas to figure out where they should be putting masts.
shaklee3 4y ago
no, it's not a strong sign of that. it's a strong sign that with VC money and government money you can offer unrealistic service at unrealistic prices. but when you need to start showing that you are profitable and launching satellites to maintain the current network is also expensive, both your service and prices start to get more in line with what everybody else already had. The honeymoon phase of starlink is over. in the best case scenario with starship they can add capacity much cheaper. but even the business case for that is going to be hard to close given the amount of money they're already burning.
- pastage 4y ago
  FWIW that is what Starlink has been saying themselves. Their operations have always been linked to cheaper launches. My opinion is that it is easy to get side tracked when your leader gets stuck in political activism.
  - cozzyd 4y ago
    Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G, leaving only truly remote areas that are low density enough. But not many people live there...
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky. Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in view of the satellite. > Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G Yup, for the most part I agree. Still, there is a pretty large rural population.
      - 4y ago
fsh 4y ago
Satellite internet essentially means that you have to share one cellphone tower with your entire district. I don't see how this can be sustainable for anything but the most rural areas.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Well, why would anyone in an urban area need something Starlink, when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths? The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
  - fsh 4y ago
    According to the article, the system is alreay overloaded in rural Kansas.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      What does the rural area have to do with starlink’s competitiveness in the urban environment?
      - sethammons 4y ago
        They are responding to your second paragraph
  - noncoml 4y ago
    > when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths That’s not true even in California. Plenty of small town where the only alternative is line of sight wireless internet.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      That’s a rural town. I explicitly said “urban”.
jacquesm 4y ago
> It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works I think that's a bit early to tell. If the launch costs + satellite costs don't add up to a very nice profit before the satellite de-orbits then that was a loss. This can look like it is working well until the number of satellites de-orbiting and needing to be replaced becomes larger than your temporary profits after launching the first constellation. This is why other comms satellite operators chose to play it safe and use geo stationary orbits rather than LEO, those satellites live many times longer and you need far fewer of them. Obviously they are limited in bandwidth and latency but they are ultra reliable.
- senectus1 4y ago
  I know three people in Australia personally that have starlink and are incredibly grateful and pleased they can get it. The business model is strong, especially with V2 on its way
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I am sure there are people that are grateful and pleased they can get it. That doesn't mean that there are enough of those people to support a constellation the size that you need for global coverage.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    People liking a service doesn’t in itself mean the business model is good. For that, the figures have to add up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
senectus1 4y ago
really looking forward to seeing starship get up there, then the V2 starlinks which will be an order of magnitude faster and better
TwoNineFive 4y ago
The ol "This is good for bitcoin" er, Starlink, argument.
bombolo 4y ago
> This is good news and not bad. In the same way that finding out about having a terminal illness is good news! > It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand. The main question is: "can it scale to offer decent speeds to more than 10 people, without having to create a dyson sphere in the sky?" Because it looks like it was yet another elon's scams to raise money with no substance.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  This is a completely and utterly unfounded comment in the light of the massive gains in progress for not only SpaceX, but also Starlink.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    I was just reading an article about how incredibly fast and reliable starlink connection is /s
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      You are arguing that because perfection was not achieved, it is a scam. This is not a reasonable position.
rkangel 4y ago
This is a reasonable argument for higher cost and lower capacity. It is not a good argument for unreliability in a service that should be fairly mature by now.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
If that were true they could afford support chat outsourced to a 3rd world country but they can't even do that.
stuaxo 4y ago
Honestly don't understand why people didn't see this one coming. Congestion seemed like an obvious outcome from the point they announced the idea of internet via satellite ?
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Honestly don't understand why people don't understand that the Starlink slogan was "better than nothing". Starlink is still magnitudes better than my previous as-expensive point-to-point wifi, which was capped at 10 Mbps at best and was nearly unusable 7-9pm every night. If you can get something better than Starlink, then you should.

Gigachad 4y ago

If the area is that congested, it's probably in need of wired connections. All the customers suddenly leaving might push ISPs to upgrade their offerings in these areas rather than seeing the customers as a captive audience.

chrisco255 4y ago
I'd love to believe that, but having seen my parents own street overlooked by cable providers for two decades despite the fact that it's no longer rural and surrounded by tens of thousands of suburban households that have mowed down all the orange groves and cow pastures, they still do not have cable internet as an option in 2023.
- brokenkebaby 4y ago
  This is a strong indicator that existing providers enjoy artificially limited competition, i.e. licensing/regulations need to be revised
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Sometimes it is purely a cost / benefit tradeoff analysis. The cable company even if a local monopoly should want my business. Although I suspect the local cable company did the original analysis back in the 90s and never factored for 25+ years of reliable revenue. And every year since some bean counter has looked at short term ROI. At any rate, I remember getting some relief when the first iPhone jailbreak was available and now for sure Starlink is a boon.

XorNot 4y ago

I mean...yes and no. Starlink is valuable provided it's cheap: above a certain price point, the number of applications drops off and there's no guarantee the remainder will represent enough to actually fund it.

lazide 4y ago
Compared to competitors, starlink is dirt cheap. Hughes has roughly 500ms ping times, and severe data caps, and was roughly that price.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Starlink actually seems underpriced to me. If the choice is Starlink, Hughes, maybe an equally barely-viable cellular hotspot, not everyone could afford $200-$300/month but a lot would.

capableweb 4y ago

The sentiment has been (up until this point?) that Starlink needs to lower costs for the customers, not increase them, as otherwise the customer base will remain as tiny as it currently is. Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the rest of the spare population?

rippercushions 4y ago
If Starship works out (and that's admittedly a big if), the price of launching Starlink satellites will plummet and they'll be able to boost the number of satellites in orbit from ~4k to 30k, which will improve bandwidth and cut costs. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configuration-for-second-gen-starlink/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu... Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm.
- jlkuester7 4y ago
  > Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm. Made me laugh out loud! :) Closest wired internet to my place is 6mi South. Also have a big hill between me and the only fixed LOS internet tower in the area. Currently, Starlink is my only real option, and it has worked fine for me so far! In my experience, an ISP with no real competition is always going to be pricy. The only way to get reasonable rates is to have some competition....
- codazoda 4y ago
  Funny story… Century Link got 500 feet of fiber pulled to my house, and I didn’t pay a dime. When they subdivided my neighborhood it was supposed to have fiber. All my neighbors had it, but not me. There’s supposed to be a major connection every other house, and mine should have it, but it doesn’t. The person at Century Link that came out to my place and found the problem pulled the original plans for the subdivision, figured out who screwed up, contacted that company, and got fiber to my place. They had to go 500 feet, under a street and two driveways. Now I have fiber. Thanks dude at Century Link. p.s. Comcast (Xfinity) came out and looked too. They noped the hell out right away.

spiantino 4y ago

That's a strange interpretation of a new upstart utility pricing itself out of competition.

ChatGTP 4y ago

What determines capacity isn't transparent. Also, yes it may get cheaper, but that’s not a given, if it doesn’t, what happens then?

Fatnino 4y ago
Price comes down when meaningful competition enters the space (see what I did there?) OneWeb seems about ready to start offering service. Remains to be seen if the offering can compete with starlink but good chance it will apply downward pressure to prices. Then in the medium distant future there is Amazon's constellation that will have to compete with starlink v3 or v4 or whatever they're up to by then.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  There's already plenty of competition going for the profitable market segments - I know of at least 4 LEO satellite ISPs that are currently operating aside from SpaceX. Residential ISP in space is not one of those by most good estimates of costs and prices. Even SpaceX themselves are saying this.

anaganisk 4y ago

This was probably what Iridium thought when they started their satellite based phone network.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Or it demonstrates it's an inefficient means to an end. Just because highways keep getting bigger doesn't mean it's the best mode of transport.

fomine3 4y ago

Here in Japan, Starlink price is continuously down (now $50) because only richer techy people (of course they have fiber and live in metropolis) buy it and they don't use much. FTTH coverage is really comprehensive even in very rural area, so there are very few residential practical use case. It would be excellent for camping. It seems that it practically priced.

realusername 4y ago
It's pretty much the same in France, standard internet cost is about 35€ and fiber is being deployed at record speed, I live in the countryside (real countryside, 50 inhabitants village) and I have access to fiber. I'm not sure starlink has a future in this kind of environment outside of niche applications. Their business model is difficult in my opinion, they both need a lot of customers from rich countries to recoup the costs but in the same time, the vast majority of those rich countries are well equipped already (or about to) since having a decent internet coverage is critical for their economies.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  It seems that Starlink works in places that fail to build either fiber or good 4G/5G coverage. But even there if the demand is too much they might not have capacity to provide good service. I don't believe it is viable model they are running.
  - realusername 4y ago
    Yeah that's clearly another issue on top, if there's a place where they have some demand, they'll have a lot of demand, it's an everything or nothing market.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Also, if such an area exists, and there are enough people willing to pay $100/month to congest starlink, then it probably makes sense for someone to set up a WISP, which will be able to provide a better service. In fact, if this isn't happening at scale already, I would expect that some WISP companies will start using starlink congestion areas to figure out where they should be putting masts.

shaklee3 4y ago

no, it's not a strong sign of that. it's a strong sign that with VC money and government money you can offer unrealistic service at unrealistic prices. but when you need to start showing that you are profitable and launching satellites to maintain the current network is also expensive, both your service and prices start to get more in line with what everybody else already had. The honeymoon phase of starlink is over. in the best case scenario with starship they can add capacity much cheaper. but even the business case for that is going to be hard to close given the amount of money they're already burning.

pastage 4y ago
FWIW that is what Starlink has been saying themselves. Their operations have always been linked to cheaper launches. My opinion is that it is easy to get side tracked when your leader gets stuck in political activism.
- cozzyd 4y ago
  Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G, leaving only truly remote areas that are low density enough. But not many people live there...
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky. Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in view of the satellite. > Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G Yup, for the most part I agree. Still, there is a pretty large rural population.
    - 4y ago

fsh 4y ago

Satellite internet essentially means that you have to share one cellphone tower with your entire district. I don't see how this can be sustainable for anything but the most rural areas.

jonathankoren 4y ago
Well, why would anyone in an urban area need something Starlink, when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths? The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
- fsh 4y ago
  According to the article, the system is alreay overloaded in rural Kansas.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    What does the rural area have to do with starlink’s competitiveness in the urban environment?
    - sethammons 4y ago
      They are responding to your second paragraph
- noncoml 4y ago
  > when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths That’s not true even in California. Plenty of small town where the only alternative is line of sight wireless internet.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    That’s a rural town. I explicitly said “urban”.

jacquesm 4y ago

> It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works I think that's a bit early to tell. If the launch costs + satellite costs don't add up to a very nice profit before the satellite de-orbits then that was a loss. This can look like it is working well until the number of satellites de-orbiting and needing to be replaced becomes larger than your temporary profits after launching the first constellation. This is why other comms satellite operators chose to play it safe and use geo stationary orbits rather than LEO, those satellites live many times longer and you need far fewer of them. Obviously they are limited in bandwidth and latency but they are ultra reliable.

senectus1 4y ago
I know three people in Australia personally that have starlink and are incredibly grateful and pleased they can get it. The business model is strong, especially with V2 on its way
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I am sure there are people that are grateful and pleased they can get it. That doesn't mean that there are enough of those people to support a constellation the size that you need for global coverage.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  People liking a service doesn’t in itself mean the business model is good. For that, the figures have to add up.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

senectus1 4y ago

really looking forward to seeing starship get up there, then the V2 starlinks which will be an order of magnitude faster and better

TwoNineFive 4y ago

The ol "This is good for bitcoin" er, Starlink, argument.

bombolo 4y ago

> This is good news and not bad. In the same way that finding out about having a terminal illness is good news! > It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand. The main question is: "can it scale to offer decent speeds to more than 10 people, without having to create a dyson sphere in the sky?" Because it looks like it was yet another elon's scams to raise money with no substance.

imwillofficial 4y ago
This is a completely and utterly unfounded comment in the light of the massive gains in progress for not only SpaceX, but also Starlink.
- bombolo 4y ago
  I was just reading an article about how incredibly fast and reliable starlink connection is /s
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    You are arguing that because perfection was not achieved, it is a scam. This is not a reasonable position.

rkangel 4y ago

This is a reasonable argument for higher cost and lower capacity. It is not a good argument for unreliability in a service that should be fairly mature by now.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

If that were true they could afford support chat outsourced to a 3rd world country but they can't even do that.

stuaxo 4y ago

Honestly don't understand why people didn't see this one coming. Congestion seemed like an obvious outcome from the point they announced the idea of internet via satellite ?

yencabulator 4y ago
Honestly don't understand why people don't understand that the Starlink slogan was "better than nothing". Starlink is still magnitudes better than my previous as-expensive point-to-point wifi, which was capped at 10 Mbps at best and was nearly unusable 7-9pm every night. If you can get something better than Starlink, then you should.