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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what the situation will be for non-commercial use, i.e. sailboats circumnavigating? Will they be able to use the RV dish and pay $150/month, or will they have to go with the $5000/month maritime option?

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Probably the more expensive option because the mid ocean service is going to require using the intra-constellation laser links where the RV is just a roaming dish that can use the normal one hop to ground station method used in the rest of the network. /Maybe/ they'll come out with a cheaper consumer option but who knows, at any rate it will probably be more expensive than the RV version.

On the one hand, you need to use the laser links for this, on the other hand, the satellites over the water aren't going to be busy, so there's not a lot of congestion to want to use pricing to discourage; certainly, there's some congestion near the shore, but there's a lot of shore.

I highly doubt that the laser links will be solely used to provide oceanic coverage for maritime users.

One of the major contraints on adding new users is SpaceX getting approval for and building new ground terminals in areas of high demand. I expect that balancing the load between ground terminals and bypassing congested cables will be a significant use-case for these laser links.

As such, I don't think it is the use of laser links that will determine the pricing of consumer maritime service when it comes.

I think time will be very expensive on them because while over the ocean they'll be dedicated to the more lucrative commercial maritime and the hypothetical HFT low latency routing products. While the satellites are over land they'll be largely free to do whatever they want with the time with their currently announced plans but making hops across the ocean the commercial contracts are going to get top priority because they'll expect it at 5k/month. And as they bring more things on that require the laser links the time is just going to get more precious and by extension expensive.

I think there is very good reason to believe that the limits of the starlink network are ingress/egress and will remain that way due to spectrum availability/licensing (among other reasons).

I absolutely believe that commercial traffic will get priotized, but I highly doubt that maritime traffic will be capable of saturating an intersatelite connection that is designed to provide a backbone for land areas with higher levels of population density.

I'm in that same boat, no pun intended. I've been waiting for the maritime announcement for awhile for my SV. I was very disappointed that they only announced commercial service.

I'd happily pay a huge premium for a gyroscoped dish, that monthly cost tho....

Check out the "starlink on boats" forum on fb. Working now for folks.

I think they'll have a more premium product for vessels that want to redistribute connectivity (i.e. cruise ships) and that probably need larger capacity. Or just a bunch of them :)

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