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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

The comments here showering Starlink with praise, acting like they're doing this to be a Bro, are bizarre.

Starlink didn't drop prices out of the goodness of their hearts.

They dropped prices because they had to. Why is debatable, but signs point to the network crumbling apart, causing them to lose customers.

It hasn't been able to scale to handle the customer load, even in rural areas: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-massive-growth-results-...

"Hundreds of miles south near Leonard, Texas, John Lawyer has encountered download rates on his Starlink dish that can dive as low as 1Mbps, especially during the evenings."

That's a town of 2,000, in a county of 35,000.

New customers are probably also put off by the signup costs and problems with "Dishy" - thermal shutdowns, a permanently attached cable for power/data, and being fairly fragile.

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It’s well known than cells in certain populated areas are at max capacity with degraded performance. The network isn’t ‘crumbling’ by any stretch. They are launching new satellites almost weekly to increase capacity. Starlink is still early days with version 2 around the corner.

>The comments here showering Starlink with praise, acting like they're doing this to be a Bro, are bizarre.

Can you link to the comments that said that?

I can just see one comment saying Starlink is better than its competitors, which might fit that description. All the other comments seem like neutral personal reports of the price reduction in various places, or comments questioning the reasons for this, or even complaining about it

Don't concern yourself with the musk derangement syndrome crowd, they basically only exist to make shit up

If there are too many customers it doesn't make sense to lower prices to convince them to leave.

If everything is working properly and the network is over capacity then it would make sense to keep prices high and accept the loss of customers.

If the network isn't working properly, and it should be able to cope with the number of users, then lowering prices to retain customers until you can fix the technical issues makes sense.

IMO they shouldn't cut price much because their available bandwidth is strictly limited by satellites that is very costly to launch (though SpaceX is really great to cut costs, it's still satellites) and not unlimitedly expandable, unlike fibers. Keep price high (but affordable) so who really needed can use service at higher speed, and make profit. Perhaps different pricing per area is good way.

If the network is crumbling because of congestion, wouldn’t the logical thing to do be to raise prices?

Why would they reduce the sign-up costs if they couldn't even handle the current customers?

I understand wanting to keep current customers by reducing the price when they are unhappy with the service. But incentivizing even more people to use the service seems to contradict your thesis.

Unscalable hype?

Huges was probably great an eon ago.

Hughes was never and will never be able to be low latency with their current setup. You’re fighting against physics at that point due to the location of the satellites compared to Starlink. They also have always had exceptionally restrictive data caps.

So I wouldn’t say they were ever “great”. Just realistic.

And data caps. Where my brother has a house in rural coastal Maine, the only two options further down his road (~1 Mbps DSL went as far as his house) were essentially Hughes or Verizon hotspot. Everyone who looked into it basically concluded that they were better than no Internet but you really couldn't do things like video streaming to any significant degree.

Starlink is a game-changer for somewhere like this that had really marginal Internet and basically someone couldn't have worked from there. (People did go into the local small city and do Internet from the cafe or library but that obviously doesn't work for regular full-time work.)

Good to know. Geostationary latency is a bitch.

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