Starlink's Latest Offering: Gigabit Gateways Starting at $75,000 per Month | Hacker News Reader

Starlink's Latest Offering: Gigabit Gateways Starting at $75,000 per Month

pcmag.com

41 points_benj17 comments

Wow! Who do they think they are to ask for such ridiculous prices, Splunk?

I assume this is for dedicated unshared bandwidth with no cap since it's for ISP. If that's the case, if it uses the average of one satellite that's 3+ million SpaceX needs to gather to break even (not counting the cost of operations or equipment itself). As far as cost competitiveness installing and maintaining an undersea cable is a worse deal (though preferable if you can afford it). Overall the prices don't shout "ridiculous!" to me by either measure. It actually seems pretty cost competitive and probably not full of 1000% margin or something.

Via another comparison it's a 10x increase vs 1 TB of priority data @40 mbps (250/m) but that's actually a good value considering this is @1000 mbps with no cap. Shooting 10 Gbps (10x cost) to the island, for example, is likely to cost a bit more than it would have to have the island's population all by Starlink individually but they'll get significantly better service as a result.

This is something that's only viable for pocket areas in remote locations though, particularly islands. Dense areas or plain rural areas fit either normal connectivity or traditional Starlink better.

> This is something that's only viable for pocket areas in remote locations though, particularly islands.

Sounds like it would be suitable for military bases and isolated infrastructure (like power plants).

Won't power plants already have connectivity though?

They have to send the power somewhere in the end anyways.

Are we pretending all of Asia and Africa and Australia and South America are swimming in bandwidth?

Military yes, power plants depends more on whether they really need multiple gigabits per second dedicated bandwidth with a million dollar receiving station or they are fine with the bandwidth provided by more traditional style terminals.

would also be very feasible for rich people's boats; these are often remote, and Starlink is already focused very much on that market. A lot of customers who'd easily have 75k flying around.

This is for ground stations only.

Oracle enters the room

I think this makes a lot of sense - this would be sufficient for an island to have its own ISP. It probably doesn't make a ton of sense for places that are on the mainland of a significant country, but if you're an island community somewhere in the pacific or off the coast of some country, it's this or bust. It also makes sense for remote research or military outposts.

Having a big pipe that then fans out with conventional technology is almost certainly a better way of getting connectivity to a town or similar. That way the bucket of service is much more efficiently allocated. They can also do things like put Netflix caching boxes or other CDN boxes in a site like this.

The deposit is $1.25 million if anyone is looking to buy a few ;-)

Given that it's 10Gbit at what is essentially the colo, I can see an enterprising person buying this and reselling it in super rural communities.

I guess you stopped reading after paragraph 2? This is specifically the use case they designed it for.

I mean, if you're looking at this in terms of an infrastructure spend as compared to running a new undersea cable to a remote island/village/site, which may cost millions of dollars, this kind of upfront cost actually seems pretty reasonable. I'd love to see comparisons to similar infrastructure projects.

I’ll take one for my van.

Down by the river.

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