Since the article doesnt make it clear
This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they’re too busy, but if you’ll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.
Price gouging is the more honest term.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.
Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.
One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.
Neither of those options would support everyone living in a high density urban area, bandwidth would drop to nothing and no one would want to buy it, and people generally hate inconsistent bandwidth, or random peak hour usage charges on their bill.
Edit: Their overall bandwidth per cell is just too low to be able to support everyone in high density areas like that.
That’s why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.
But now we’re talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end.
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
Satellite internet is a last resort. People shouldn’t be using it if they have fibre broadband or 5G options that provide the same speeds. It’s a lifesaver if you’re on a boat, or live off grid, or just a few miles from where the broadband ends. But if it’s anywhere with other people then it’s going to max out with horrible contention. At the point the only option is “moar satellites”.
I just tried setting up an order. It told me it would be $55 a month.
Who wrote this article?
“A SpaceX support page (which appears to only be available in Swahili, for some erason)”
Don’t get me wrong. Fuck any satellite service, and especially FUCK fElon. This article is trash, though.
First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people
The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”
There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.
-
$1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.
-
$500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].
-
$1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.
Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.
-
LOL…from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.
From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.
Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.
Theyre still improving bandwidth with each launch as the newer hardware goes up, they haven’t approached the flat line of 1 dish comes down for 1 dish going up which would be at the 5 year mark of no improved hardware or launch capabilities.
Once starship is operational, its 20x the bandwidth per launch, and cadence will increase so there’s still tons of room to scale, and its not like those dishes wont improve either.
I mean, high demand shouldn’t justify surprise pricing
When do I get charged??
I’ve had Starlink for two years. My monthly bill is $55 a month, and no rental either…
Common dude, don’t support elon
For many people, their options are supporting Elon, or not having internet access. I don’t blame anyone for choosing the former.
There are no options in rural areas, yet.
We don’t all live in overcrowded cities.
The whole concept is rotten right from the start.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Under Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.
That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.
And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted.
“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it’s Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.
From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.
The article states that pushing consumer satellite internet instead of cables/mobile is basically BS, in my words.
I didn’t ask a literal question.
Brendan Carr deserves a fate worse than Mr Hands.
I think they’ll rug pull hard line internet for residents.
It’s all that escaped with a bit of net neutrality.
Cellular and satalitte both allow traffic shaping and that’s the more profitable.
Hell, maybe they can nationalize it and get Elin paid.
You can traffic shape wired traffic as well
I thought that was still legally protected, but I know it’s been a target for a while.
Hell, maybe they can nationalize it and get Elin paid.
Nationalizing it and turning it into a public utility instead of for profit would be a good thing. Or in this case it should belong to the whole world and run by the UN.
Fine by me. All his customers are a bunch of suckers
I am an IT bod with a mountain rescue team in the UK. Personally I would bin starlink in a heartbeat. I dislike Elon, I dislike the privatisation of satellite garbage. The impact it had on the night sky, on astronomy. I dislike the pettish for abuse from a fascist American oligarchy and government.
However… For now it is by far the single best option when cell communications are out of range.
Ehh, some are. Some just live so far out that the sweet song of broadband feels worth it.
I hate the fuck out of the man, but if I were doing camper life, i’d want it.
Yeah I know a Yupik woman who’s talked about how much it improved things in the village she’s from. Places that need a small plane charter and a snowmobile to visit still benefit from having internet these days
Ukraine is a user, as is (with stolen terminals) Russia.
Investors should have learned by now that Musks endeavors are 100% ADHD cycle projects; hyper focus, obsess, launch, start to lose interest, hop on the the next, abandoning previous project, instead of building on the success.
deleted by creator
If a V1 satellite only has 24 Gbit/s in total capacity on its links to the base station, and a V2 mini satellite only 96 Gbit/s, then it’s no wonder really.
The v3 dishes will be 20x bandwidth per launch than the v2 mini.
Even if starships 2nd stage isn’t reusable, it’ll still be able to launch those into orbit, albeit at a much higher cost.
To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you’re reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.
How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?
I thought the whole point of this service was to provide internet to places that traditional services couldn’t reach. Meaning they wouldn’t be over populated because those people already have good internet.
Now that I think it through, there’s no way that demographic is generating enough money to make this work.
Whoops?
The whole point is war not helping consumers. Wire and cell towers are already not only cheaper but straight up better in every measure: latency, bandwidth, cost, maintenance, deployment, maturity.
You could literally cover entire land mass of earth for space x valuation with fiber and cell towers and still have left over money to do the ocean too.
Starlink has always been a shitty cell service at best. Only now the towers have to be entirely replaced every three or so years if memory serves.
Coulda just run fiberoptic but that would be the boring solution with a lower return.
It does make sense for very rural customers. For my parents to get fiber like you suggest, someone would have to string up about 10 miles of fiber to gain like 50 customers, maybe. With another 90 miles of fiber they can get all the way to 1000 people served; idk how many households that is but the unit economics don’t make sense.
Rural, cellular dead zones (eg desert, mountain passes), air, ocean/seas/large lakes.
To cover rural reliably though you end up having to be over dense areas as well, but they cant really compete in the dense areas as they’ll be cheaper options, but you can make some money there since you already cover it. The area they could best compete there would be critical backup service.
I mean if we’re looking at pure economics, it’s probably not even worth running power lines to your parents. Matter of fact, they probably wouldn’t even have electricity if the government didn’t force electrical companies to build power lines to everyone, with the electrification act of 1968.
It isnt worth it, but at least in Canada and USA we’ve given the ISPs billions of dollars to service them, and they keep adding a token amount of people and saying shucks all the money is gone we couldn’t do what we said, and then we give them more. Rinse and repeat.
Give it 50 years of replacing satellites and I am willing to bet a one time install of fiber would have been cheaper.
Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.
There’s an old joke in the telecom world:
Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?
A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.
The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.
Those satellites are all earning profit everywhere else around the world they can service. That line to a 100 person community taking decades to be profitable is money the ISPs dont want to spend because it’ll take decades.
I’d like to see someone setup cell towers across the pacific ocean. I even started dreaming up what it would take/cost - but I soon realized it would never be worth it so I’m not asking for investors. (though probably I should have… Anyone know a VC with money to burn?)
Wait so you’re saying the ships, just the ships moving across the pacific are enough reason to have low earth orbit satellites in such quantity they impede things as simple as looking at the stars? The ships can get internet from higher earth orbit satellites that don’t have to be constantly replaced. We haven’t been choosing between internet and no internet with starlink, there has been satallite internet way before starlink and there will be way after. All it takes is a less cooperative FAA not allowing so many rocket launches for the AI nazi company and slowly holes form in the coverage as the satellites burn up.
I’d like to see someone setup cell towers across the pacific ocean.
Fiber cables cross-cross the oceans many times.
Fiber without cell towers are pointless. Ships and boats commonly have starlink internet now, because it is so much better than any alternative. Cell towers are needed for fiber to compete.
The pacific has some deep trenches, I don’t think fiber runs across them.
map of fiber cables:
That would be a reasonable expectation, but I want to remember this being talked about as a revolution for internet in the US; how much better it would be compared to shitty cable providers and how you would get Gigabit speeds without having to run fibre.
Sure, it looked impressive early on, but a wireless system like this will always degrade the more customers they get.
I also remember it was cautioned early on that they had limited bandwidth and so focused on rural areas and a backup for cell phones. For rural areas this is better than having to run fiber (rural areas typically didn’t have cable, though they were running fiber close enough to get DSL - better than nothing but very slow)
