I almost got it, but gave up because of the CEO being the way he is. It’s very likely that they will raise prices or add a lot of bullshit restrictions after initial adoption, and the dish is kind of expensive to buy and cancel once the bullshit starts.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the pricing structure and availability of Starlink is so competitive that it is demolishing the national/ state-owned infrastructure (NBN co), who are haemorrhaging users to Starlink.
In part because the previous conservative government ruined the network for pricing and in part because of the superior performance of the lower satellites. Either way, Starlink is faster and cheaper than infrastructure the citizens already own.
They didn’t cheap out. Liberals (the name of the conservative party, basically Republicans) spent 3 times as much money for a shitter product, and now Australia has to spend it all over again to redo it.
You don’t get it. Slow and high ping is part of the tech, but not the problem, and not only why people are leaving: it’s the price. Australia owns the satellite and all the infrastructure. The NBN satellite should be cheaper than musklink. It isn’t, because of the Liberal party.
Musklink isn’t taking vdsl or fibre customers. 5G is.
You can get 600mbps for $85 a month with Telstra. That is what kills fibre and why metro is leaving the NBN.
I just checked the price and its $599 for the hardware + $99 deposit + $50 shipping. After that the service costs $120/month. I pay $65/month for fiber at the moment.
If it is a fact, feel free to release an intelligent assessment based on more than a single data point. I’m guessing you’ve said things other people thought were stupid on occasion.
My position is perfectly straightforward: by asserting their belief that their own behaviour of calling people “dumb” with no elaboration was acceptable, that user gave us all implicit permission to speak to them that way without any objection from them, lest they betray a hypocritical stance.
I responded by doing just that as a parody to demonstrate that it clearly is rude behaviour. I subjected them to the discomfort of having such rhetoric leveraged against them, a situation they clearly neglected to consider in their hasty self-serving defence. If I had elaborated any further, it would have defeated the purpose of the parody.
But in your case, I decided upon an overly verbose self-serious tone, also as a form of parody. Is that assessment sufficiently intelligent for you?
Move Starlink around? You can. The roam plan costs more and has the lowest priority in traffic, but it does work. We’ve been using it for internet access in our RV all over the US this summer as we work from the road.
If you have fiber, it’s unlikely you will benefit from something like Starling. Transfer data wirelessly through a constellation of satellites will have running costs much higher than just having a fibre. That is unless you have to dog a trench or run a fibre on mast for km for just one customer, which is where Starling starts making more sense.
Starling is for rural customers, mobile customers, and possibly an option to counter monopoly abuse by some Telco companies. But if you are in a city with fibre, then do use the fibre, that’s your better option.
No surprise there. It’s overpriced, the quality is poor, the connection is frequently unstable, and the owner of a company is a bigot, who’s also intervening in a war. To absolutely no one’s surprise, this never would have reached the numbers he promised
Talk for yourself. Some of us need starlink. Quality is great. Price is high but it’s space internet. Again connection is pretty fucking stable. Playing GeForce now on my TV thanks to starlink.
The product is objectively the worst possible option in any place that has options, which is most places. It may be useful for some people in some remote parts of the world. Doesn't make it a good product though. It just makes it the only product on offer.
We have options, just not good ones. After Starlink, the next best option where I live is 4G internet, which is way slower. Another satellite service or dialup are other options, both much worse than Starlink. We do not live in a remote location, just barely rural, and only a few kms from a town with gigabit fibre. Starlink is a fantastic service that has only gone down twice for us in the 7 months we’ve had it, and even then only briefly. I don’t think I can fully impress upon you just how much better it has made things.
Its not competing against cable or fiber, its competing against satellite internet and DSL. My family has a place in rural Maine and we used to have Hughesnet satellite internet and starlink is half the price and like 50x the speed.
I agree. It’s the only option for internet in many places. I’m very happy with my Starlink service. I’d drop it in a heartbeat if there was a better option but for now it fits my needs.
First of all I think you meant the Tesla of the internet provider industry. And also, by your definition, even Tesla isn’t the Tesla of the EV industry 😅
You said starlink was the Tesla of the EV industry. But they aren’t part of the EV industry, they are an internet provider.
And many people would argue that Tesla is not leaps and bounds above the competition, but rather falling behind the competition after starting with a huge head start.
It’s a figure of speech. Breathe of the wild is the soulsborne of Nintendo. I honestly can’t explain it. Yes Tesla was the Pinnacle during the early years of EV. Starlink is the Pinnacle of space internet. I’m sure it will get overtaken. Currently musk has resources that others don’t, namely space x
Maybe I coined it wrong. Starlink is the Tesla of the space internet. Is that better
Not necessarily trailblazers. Similar to apple. They took products that existed and made them mainstream appeal. That’s the difference. Satellite Internet has been around for ages but not easy and user friendly. Same with evs. Been around since 19th century.
Tesla wasn’t even that great, they just had more marketing (and installed some charging stations on the west coast usa) than many of the companies they did RnD with at the time
“Tesla of the ev industry”… meaning overpriced shit. Kind of is considering other satellite providers offer far cheaper service but with higher latency.
all 3 of the other largest intersat providers cover most of the world, Viasat for example cover most everything other than the deep Sahara and the exact borders of Russia
You’ve clearly never read anything about Starlink and it’s implementation. Rural customers are desperate for any alternatives, and Starlink has 100s of LEO satellites vs Viasat’s… 4.
Ya, that’s because Viasat has their satellites in a higher orbit, covering more land per sat, and allowing them to use beefier satellites (this is important for reliability, what most of the sat-com users need as you recently saw in Ukraine).
but no, I have in fact read plenty about Starlink, and its implementation, and know full well that this is literally just “bigger number more impressive”, most rural customers who needed internet already know about sat-coms.
As for the 1 million (21 million short of projected users, because turns out rural people already know about sat-com, and why switch?), many of those are, and I hate to sound like a rural elitist, people from cities who only recently moved out into the middle of nowhere.
as for the LEO vs. GSO, it is about 400ms extra ping, but unless you are stock trading or playing video games ping doesn’t really matter, and you shouldn’t do either of them over sat-coms anyway.
I’ve heard mixed reviews, the big problem seems to be stability, at least around my area. I’ve heard it goes down frequently in heavy rain and snow (I’m in Canada), and people have had problems with satellites being blocked by trees (lots of trees in Canada).
For people with no access to Internet as is that’s still a huge upgrade, but for people who were hoping it would open up the possibility of moving to and working remotely in more rural areas without good wired internet coverage it’s a total letdown.
Hasn’t gone down since March. Went down yesterday. Worldwide outage. My previous sat system went down frequently. Like once a week. Was 30mb down at full. Usually managed 15 most days. Sundays were pretty much unusable. Other options were dal at top 15.
So starlink is a fucking god send.
I think it is exactly that. Yes trees impact but you don’t put the dish there. We had a good damn cyclone. It was fine. We were the only people in the area who had internet. The road washed out along with fibre. Can’t get a better recommendation than that.
I love that you have 6 downvotes probably purely because you dared to say Starlink is good for your use case. Haven’t you heard the news that Musk is bad therefore you’re a bad person too for using Starlink?
I was just saying this to my partner. Down voted for just stating my case. I even end with fuck musk.
Can’t win em all. I seem to have 6 down voted on all my comments. So im guessing someone doesn’t like me and is writing a script or bot to diwnvote me.
I see tons of ads when I drive around rural Indiana for Hughesnet. I’ve never seen an ad for Starlink. Why aren’t they even marketing it to rural midwesterners?
They honestly don’t even seem interested in anyone in the midwest getting it. They’re only really interested in the coasts.
To get Starlink near me you need to be put onto a waiting list for them to roll it out to your area. But closer to the coasts (you don’t even have to be all that close, Idaho gets it) and you can sign up and get started right away.
I can sort of see that with Tesla. The word of mouth thing working for a pricey car brand. But the only way you’re going to get farmers to know about Starlink is to advertise it to them.
Yep, find a cheapo 5g modem with an ethernet port that's capable of being given an identity crisis from the usual sources and you'll be golden...ask me how I know. We ain't got shit out where I am other than garbage DSL, but decent 5g coverage from the big 3 surprisingly.
Starlink only serves a purpose in truly rural or remote areas where, unsurprisingly, they'll make no money. The number of people I see using it as a backup connection or aggregate it with terrestrial cable or fiber connections is obscene... and a waste of money imo.
Not everything is accurate that I said or believed 7 years ago, no.
However, when a person builds a business on habitual over-promising, then it is an issue. Speculation is awesome! Telling people what they want to hear, because money, isn’t awesome.
They almost had me on the hook right up to when they decided tiered and throttled plans were the way to go. its essentially a hyped up cellphone plan. so glad I bailed. Also, fuck muskrat.
Outside of the Ukrainian war, I’m not seeing much good use of this Starlink constellation.
Urban areas are already built to 5G, meaning high-speed wireless internet at far cheaper prices than satellite could ever hope to deliver.
Suburban areas have high 5G coverage, though it isn’t perfect yet. As well as aging 4G (okay), but also a plentitude of fiber options from Verizon and Comcast. No, it isn’t perfect, but the crappiest Comcast connection is still better than the best Starlink could ever offer in terms of price and reliability.
Rural areas are already covered by Viasat. Which is going to be more efficient due to the simple nature of only needing like 5 to 10 satellites in the 100-year orbit height… rather than 60,000+ Starlink satellites in the 5-year orbit height.
Ukraine gets a benefit because Russians are actively trying to jam the communications, so ~5 to 10 satellites could get disrupted, but its a lot harder to jam 60,000 satellites floating around. So yes, Starlink did manage to find a niche… only to have the lord of the communications openly claim that Crimea belongs to Russia and shutdown a Ukrainian operation.
So suddenly, Ukraine can’t trust Starlink anymore. So who the hell wants to use this constellation?
You realize that the Ukrainians are spending $2500 / month per terminal, right?
This isn’t a cheap system. Yeah, focusing on America where we have subsidies for rural internet (Government to pay part of those costs) is for a damn good reason. I’m not sure who can afford this in practice.
It is said that the terminal costs $1,300. And I’d expect that the communications will be hundreds+ / month. There’s not actually a lot of people around the world who can afford that, but shoot. You can tell me which countries you think this is a good business idea for.
As I said earlier: Ukraine has crazy requirements where the Russians are conducting electronic warfare (and other… warfare…) where the costs are worth it. Anyone else? Because Viasat is right there at like $100/month. Unless you NEED a way to escape the Russian jamming of traditional satellites, why would you pay Starlink’s crazy high costs?
“Rural” includes oceans. So airplanes who are flying across oceans use Viasat right now, and its likely cheaper and more available than Starlink in practice thanks to the far fewer satellites that Viasat needs to launch and maintain. Yeah, 10 satellites are way, way cheaper than 40,000+ satellites. Who’d a thunk it?
I work on a ship and am in the Galapagos right now. Thr island is covered in Starlink terminals and they’ve changed the internet existence here. Posting this via public starlink WiFi. I have a friend in the Philippines, and same there, huge impact.
His point about your US centric point is valid.
Starlink has many issues network wise, but the price point is per country so it is still being well used around the world in rural existence.
Companies today run below costs to trick you into thinking they are legitimate businesses.
You need to calculate the actual costs of launching 60,000 satellites every 5 years because this dumbass idea literally falls out of the sky because the orbit paths are so low.
Much like how Uber or MoviePass have fake business models with fake prices for years, Starlink has a fake price on the consumer facing side.
So how do we get closer to the real price? We look at the thousands of terminals or other large scale deployments of Starlink. Like Ukraine’s $2500 price point.
I understand that $100/month internet is gamechanging. However, it is also fake if it’s coming from Starlink, because we Americans can find companies for years to make a loss in 3rd world countries and fake our growth.
Adjust the stats closer to reality, and you see the immediate problems.
Hey you make some really good points and I appreciate your contribution to the discussion, but maybe dial it back 20% on the sass. You don’t need to make it personal by saying
You don’t understand today’s economy
Anyways, assuming that your assertions are accurate, what’s the angle for Musk? You’re implying Starlink will corner the market in certain areas with unrealistic price points, and then raise prices eventually? Or is there a more insidious corporate strategy I’m not recognizing?
You’re implying Starlink will corner the market in certain areas with unrealistic price points, and then raise prices eventually?
Basically, yeah. I’m not saying they “will” do that, but this is what they’re hoping to accomplish.
Think jet.com, Uber (and UberEats), WeWork, Bird scooters, etc. etc. This isn’t anything particular to Musk, this is just how US companies have operated over the past 10 years.
Musk is good at this strategy mind you. But he’s hardly unique in regards to doing it. MoviePass was really bad at this strategy, but plenty of others “succeeded”. (Not true success in my books, but a financial success in that they got big enough that a big bank bought them out and they’re hundred-millionaires now. Even if the company is worthless with terrible business plan like jet.com was, if the company leaders/owners were bought out, they see that as a personal success). Key to this strategy is raising more-and-more money from venture capitalists and IPO / SPOs by hyping (over-hyping) and misleading your statistics a bit. Speaking in half truths, pretend you’re solving world-changing problems (We’re going to Mars!!!), etc. etc. Its all a package deal.
I support a few business that have locations in Texas that can’t get fiber or cable internet. We use Viasat for them. I wanted starlink since we were seeing people with the service that had way better speeds and latency compared to Viasat.
No wireless communication will beat physical connection ever. Period. There’s not argument in it to be had.
All of wireless bandwidth can be crammed in a single fiber optic cable. All of it, with room to spare. And then you realize you can run as many as you like in parallel while in wireless communication only one device can talk at the time.
Rural areas are already covered by Viasat. Which is going to be more efficient due to the simple nature of only needing like 5 to 10 satellites in the 100-year orbit height… rather than 60,000+ Starlink satellites in the 5-year orbit height.
Latency sucks with Viasat. You won’t play multiplayer games on it, and even web browsing will be sluggish with how many round trips displaying just a single page requires nowadays.
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