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Poorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet as 2021. Starlink's customer acquisit
by lkbm 3y ago
Poorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet as 2021.
Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can afford to advertise way more than before. If they can pick up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever that's worth).
- ghaff 3y agoMy dad's (now brother's) house a few minutes outside a decently-sized town by Downeast Maine standards had a barely 1Mbps down "broadband" link and it was the last house on the road that could even get that. With Starlink, it's actually viable to work from there in addition to streaming video etc. Of course, he wouldn't pay literally any amount but he'd probably pay a lot; I would.
- lkbm 3y agoYeah, I suspect they could have gotten my brother to pay the old full cost plus extra. Still, many people in rural areas aren't willing/able to drop $1k on Internet setup, so keeping costs down is worth more than gouging a few remote software engineers.
- ghaff 3y agoCertainly. I'm sure there's a correlation between poor wired broadband and lower income even if it's not perfect. But Starlink is a game changer for a lot of people who otherwise can't get decent wired Internet--and, especially if you can't get wired broadband, the options are mostly pretty bad. Probably changing some with 5G but still not ideal for many people.
- jhallenworld 3y agoThis is an idiotic USA problem. For example, China claims: http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html
- lkbm 3y agoYeah, okay. What's your point? Is sixty million Americans not a big enough market for an ISP?