Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?
The only other options, until Starlink launches in my area, are traditional satellites. My neighbor previously had one of those, and he had an 8GB cap per MONTH. Plus the ping time averaged like 600ms.
I'm not even mad about the price of $94. Internet is way, way worth it. The quality of the connection sucks, though. I would pay $200 for Starlink once it's reliable. I'm not actually sure what my limit is, but it's pretty high, because rural internet is painful
actual dedicated 1:1 geostationary network capacity costs at a minimum $1600 per Mbps per month each direction (eg: 2 Mbps down x 0.5 Mbps up circuit would easily be $3500/mo)
People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that terrestrial services there are better spec'd and cheaper.
For me (in AU) it's compelling because I otherwise have an option of a 3G yagi / booster (nearest tower is 15km away, service is awful normally, but unusable in storms, frequently highly contended, etc), dial-up (there's very few places that still offer such a service, and just the landline connection fee is $40 / month to start with), or geo-stationary satellite (what I've just moved away from after 2+ years, which has > 600ms RTT to the nearest capital city, and a max downstream of 25Mbps, which is also frequently highly contended during peak times.
The 100W / hour usage is frustrating, and claims of electricity being 'just 10c / kWh' are quaint, I guess coming from well serviced parts of EU / US? Here most people are up for 30c (AUD) / kWh, and if on ToU that can go up to 60c during peak (2pm through 8pm). I've got solar, so on average I'm powering this 'for free' 25% of the time.
Dumb Q - is satellite any better in a storm?
1) The storm would have to be right on top of the ground station to be in the line of sight when talking to a satellite. For the 3g case, the storm could be anywhere along the 15km between the two ground stations.
2) Storms typically cover a larger area horizontally than they do vertically, so for most angles, communicating with a satellite should go through less of the cloud than horizontal 3g communication. I'm sure there could be storms where this is not true (eg a tall thunderstorm directly above the ground station), but my guess is that such storms are more rare.
Starlink during storms, and we've have a half dozen big ones since I got this service 4 months ago, seems to do more re-acquires during those events (several seconds of drop-outs) but I'm not seeing significantly lengthy outages.
The dish is still sitting on some concrete blocks on the ground, so it may simply be that it's wobbling more during the wilder winds.
in your case about $16.74 if you subtract 25% for the estimate of benefit from your solar (grid tied?) kWh going back to the grid
For the average Australian user, it means you add ~ $200-350 / year to your effective ISP cost. Not end of world for most, but certainly not trivial for all, either.
The regrettable history of Australian internet provisioning (specifically our national broadband network) and electricity pricing (specifically the rorts and corruption, and higher-than-rest-of-world pricing) are described much more eloquently by others.
I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.
This also means that, at least for us, 99$ (88€) per month for such a thing is a lot more at the end of the year (+756€). I hope they’ll eventually adjust that price for different markets because at the moment it’s not even competitive in my area.
If you get a good tech they will help you, you may get a dud, in which case you simply have to call them up and work the system again.
It's totally doable, I've done it dozens of times at every dwelling I've inhabited. I'm currently on their 1GB plan, and I do get 1.4Gbps down (they recently upped their provisioning rate, and with a newer modem with 1 2GB link on it, with a suitable router [I run the UDM Pro] it works).
A regular unlimited Gigabit Uplink runs 40€-80€ a month, with hardware included and a power usage in the range of 10W.
But, unfortunately, anywhere you have a Garden large enough to host starlink, you probably won't have anything near that speed available, so it's still pretty competitive.
:(