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Comment by tzm | Hacker News Reader

I live in the Mission hills of SF Bay and pay $600 / mo for internet via mobile hotspot (LTE). HughesNet is terrible. Nothing else is available. I can't wait for Starlink beta!

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bro why are you paying so much for LTE?

you could get one with 400gb LTE data for $80 a month: https://www.onlinewirelessmall.com/att-hotspot-49-99prepaid-...

or there's these ones that don't have a cap??? https://www.onlinewirelessmall.com/att-netgear779s-with-plan...

or buy a grandfathered plan off of ebay that has truly unlimited (no throttling) for less than $100 a month

or there's dozens of other options with hundreds of GBs of data per month that are a fraction of the $600 a month you're paying. There is no reason to be paying that much and there are other options you haven't considered.

> $600 / mo for internet via mobile hotspot (LTE).

I'm not familiar with that area but my mind boggles at this amount. What kind of speeds do you get? Are that ISP able to offer a cheaper deal of some sort, eg 12 months? Why is it so much!?

Wishing you well, I hope you get Starlink soon in your area, or any alternatives.

I would assume it's so expensive due to data usage. Anything over LTE I've seen has ridiculously low data caps. I think as part of this funding the FCC should have a mandatory requirement of no data caps, or a cap of something more reasonable like 10TB a month that increases 5TB every X number years.

1TB sounds more reasonable than 10. 10 is way over the top

I assume you don't have kids stuck at home during covid. I have friends that are burning through 1TB of data a month like it's nothing. Between zoom/webex meetings all day for everyone in the family, and netflix in the evenings because they can't really go play with other friends, 1TB is a joke. Heck, Cyberpunk 2077 is a 70GB download ALONE - that's 7% of your cap gone from you or your kid installing one game.

That game will provide you plenty of content for that data. Anyway, just because a few people use ~1TB of data doesn't mean every LTE plan should provide 10TB. You are asking for a 500x increase in the typical LTE data plan.

I said people receiving the fcc funding. As far as I know, none of the LTE players have been taking funds. If they have been I guess I don’t really care if it’s a 5x or 500x increase, it’s a reasonable requirement in 2029 IMO. The cost of transit bandwidth is nothing.

I'm not OP, but my parents house in Missouri sits around $300/mo for internet via mobile hotpot, occasionally getting up to around $500/mo in the months were a lot of family visit. HughesNet is their only available ISP, so they just went with a data plan through either AT&T or T-Mobile ("unlimited" but with a data cap with expensive overages that also drop you down to dialup-esque speeds) and stick that SIM card in their router.

There was also a brief stint of time when I lived in Europe in a long-term Airbnb that didn't tell us there was a data cap (and since we weren't real residents, we couldn't set up our own internet) and I got nearly $500/mo for a few months doing video calls for work etc from my LTE.

Very doubtful starlink will work close to major metro areas.

They may ration service to a few people in big cities but i'm doubtful they will offer it at all to be honest.

Why in the world wouldn't they offer it everywhere at whatever their max terminal per square mile is?

I think I read somewhere the beam size for starlink is around 200km diamater. That's actually really far. You'd probably want to service rural areas fairly distant from metro areas well, rather than slam the sat with a handful of suburban city customers.

I could be wrong but my guess is they will blacklist areas near cities entirely at least to begin with and focus on very rural areas with literally no alternative (no LTE etc).

Personally I think Starlink is going to have capacity crisis quickly if takeup is anywhere near as strong as demand seems to be and I'm sure SpaceX know this, so by fcoussing almost entirely on very rural areas (and maybe niche commercial/govt uses in more urban enviroments) they have a chance at managing demand a bit. Or they will start ramping up cost of service and/or putting very punitive bandwidth caps on (like all other sat providers).

I still think Starlink is an amazing breakthrough, but it really is a solution only for the 'last'/most rural 1% of households (or less).

I assume they will eventually dynamically price based on density, to ensure it's available to whoever needs it and not where other equivalent or faster options are available for less money.

By definition I think the places that need Starlink the most won't hit density limits. But I think a lot of people will buy Starlink just because it's Starlink -- anything so their dollars aren't going to Comcast.

Whom are you paying that much?

Check-out T-Mobile home internet. 50$/month unlimited 5G & LTE hotspot.

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