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Comment by dibujante | Hacker News Reader

$5000 a month? That's pretty embarrassing, isn't it? That indicates they aren't doing satellite-to-satellite and are using some kind of specialized hardware to simply send the signal to coastal satellites from farther away.

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The only thing a $5000/mo price tag indicates is that they think their target demo will pay $5000/mo

Compared to what?

Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…

I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.

Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.

It seems more of a question of supply and demand than a limitation of their technology. If the competition currently charges more than $5000, why should they charge (much) less?

Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.

Agreed, currently it does not seem to be competitive (Inmarsat also offers significant discounts on their coastal plans for the same reason). But with their projected coverage in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, it's a very different story.

Not really embarrassing when nothing else exists like it.

350mbps is _insane_ for this

It is! But their architecture should enable them to hit a much lower price point. Maybe it's just charging what the market will bear? If this is what they need to charge to be profitable, though, that indicates the satellite-to-satellite approach doesn't scale well, or they've been losing money.

If you selling a service that doesn't yet exist (or where you are an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition), usually you want to charge as much as you can while still selling all your inventory.

Your actual cost is irrelevant.

Or maybe it's the Tesla Roadster of this particular long-term plan. Some scoff, others wait for the price on the upcoming tier that's not quite 350 Mbps...

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