Starlink adds $25/month to let users move their internet around | Hacker News Reader

Starlink adds $25/month to let users move their internet around

techcrunch.com

This is pretty exciting. The last remaining hurdle I had to doing a motorcoach-to-tiny-home conversion was reliable, high-speed, low latency Internet access and it looks like that hurdle has just been cleared.

Aside from the hurdle of actually getting your hands on one of these things! LOL.

I use Trifecta Wireless. For $129 a month you get an old grandfathered in true unlimited 4g data plan on Verizon with a router and everything.

So far it's been awesome, it's not as fast as starling promises, but it works for streaming, video calls, etc and we've never really had coverage issues driving all over the western US.

It's really a very workable, exists now solution.

I have yet to read anything about how all these satellites in LEO, many visible to the naked eye, are interpreted by isolated communities ("tribes"). The ISS is visible, yes ? And others ? So what happens to the worldviews and creation myths and celestial imaginings of people who have known only the quiet night sky and the occasional meteorite ?

What about planes? I don't think there's a tribe so remote they don't know any technology... Some isolate from it on purpose, but that doesn't mean they don't know about it.

Possibly the Sentinelese? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people

Not exactly a tribe, but there is the case of the Lykovs: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...

They just figured that the other humans were probably up to some fancy shenanigans again, instead being impressed by things like cellophane (granted, they had the benefit of knowing of the existence of the outside world).

I think it might be similar for many isolated tribes. By now they have probably seen enough signs to deduce that the things they're seeing are created by fellow humans, since satellites and planes have been a thing for a few generations now. Especially with satellites having predictable orbits.

Starlink took a $100 deposit from me over two years ago and I haven't heard anything, and their page to request a refund is broken.

Where are you located?

Out in eastern Colorado, we put in a deposit at the end of Jan. 2021, and didn't get to actually order a unit until December of 2021.

California, bay area

Can you post a link to the page, out of curiosity?

when it becomes hard to maintain costs with government funding, you start to raise prices, after killing all competition in the way btw, the story of many US companies

There is no competition in the US for starlink though. If you are out of Comcast or ATT range, you get nothing or maybe 1.5MB DSL.

Of course there is no competition, it's impossible to run a business with such low price, nobody can have access to government funding, that's what i meant by "they kill the competition", and are now raising prices for everything because otherwise it's not profitable, and sudently, the product isn't interesting anymore because it is as expensive as with other actors, but they now got the infrastructure, paid by the GOV and can play with it as they please (satellite surveillance perhaps?, we seen that with ukraine)

It's not just starlink it's everything else, tesla/spacex, without government, it's a multi-part story

I think it’s still very interesting even at $200. RVs, remote log cabins… get proper internet access from the remote parts of the US.

How have they killed the competition when none has existed yet? Internet megaconstellations aren't even 5 years old as a technology accessible to consumers, Starlink is the first mover in the space and the infrastructure isn't even complete yet. You also mention SpaceX, but they revived competition in the industry and still maintain the lowest cost and highest capability in the industry despite having a massive tech lead.

The pricing increases have been stated as being to keep up with inflation and considering that inflation is currently at ~8.5%, a price increase of ~10% makes sense.

Satellite internet has existed for decades, and is common out of range of cable. Starlink is better, but it’s not the first.

Viasat (https://www.viasat.com/) has not gone out of business yet. Also https://www.hughesnet.com/ still has a website. I'm not sure why they are not mentioned in this context.

Because they aren't really competitors. It's like if I were talking iPhone 1 compeitotors, and you bring up cordless phones. Like yes, they are similar devices.. but latency / price / bandwidth is RIDICILIOUSLY different. hughesnet is like 15GB of data? They automatically rewrite all your videos to 480p? Latency of 300ms + making it impossible to game and hard to VOIP.

The roaming surcharge is to manage cell congestion. If everyone roams, capacity planning is more challenging, and everyone will have a degraded experience.

It depends on volumes. Has this been demonstrated or measured? It seems like a market-will-bear valuation to me.

I think with Starlink there are 2 types of congestion: typical oversubscription and available frequency assignments in a cell. The former the market can evaluate like any other carrier but the latter is really more a known hard limitation they have to avoid.

A flat-rate surcharge doesn't mitigate the problem, not to mention they seem to already be solving the problem with deprioritizing roaming traffic anyway, thus the surcharge being a BS money grab.

It's not really raising prices if it's an add-on feature though.

Separate from this, prices have been increased.

At the same time, speeds have gone down. I’m considering going back to my Verizon hotspot.

It is if the feature was assumed to be added later and just wasn't technically feasible. I mean, if TSLA rolled out full foolproof self-driving tomorrow, but wanted an additional 10k to enable "passenger mode" where you could watch TV while the car was driving itself people wouldn't be like "oh that's fine, new feature"

Unlike fiber and cable, starlink does not benefit having a bunch of customers located in one spot. Bandwidth is limited and adding more requires either newer satellites with higher bandwidth backbone or more overlap on satellite coverage. The fee is to discourage people from being completely mobile with the ground station.

Additionally, there's little competition for starlink because it's such a new tech. There are a bunch of companies working on similar tech that will launch in the next few years. Mobile satellite internet has been pretty shitty in the past with major companies like Inmarsat, Iridium, and Hughes that can only provide slow, expensive links. The best service from Iridium is only good for 700kbps.

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