The equipment was originally manufactured at $3000. Now it's below $750.
Have you ever paid for satellite Internet before?
Paying less than $1 per GB is something that happened because of starlink.
Yes, as the first public internet provider in North Europe (1988) I paid for almost all satellite Internet services before and usually was one of the earliest adopters. For example [1].
In 1997 I met with Ian Alexander and proposed him to deploy his first 400 meter long rigid airships at 10km-20km height to become the first very low-orbit internet provider. He subsequently got an experimental flying permit in my country through my political parliamentary contacts.
It turned out to cost $40K per month to crew the rigid airships 24/7, just barely profitable for a 500km circle of reception.
>Paying less than $1 per GB is something that happened because of starlink.
The actual cost of 1 GB transit traffic in 2024 is $0,00006944 (I am sorry, I may be off by a factor of 1024, than it could be $0,0711, My apologies, as soon as I have this confirmed I won't be able to edit this HN comment anymore).
Starlink buys internet transit traffic locally where your receiver is, then bounces it off their satellite back to you. So they pay very little compared to what they charge you. And I have never ever been able to download 1 GB for $1, they throttle you long before you reach 75 GB per month.
And when your area is oversubscribed they just throttle your traffic, no need to raise the price.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...
Other estimates and other credible sources point out that SpaceX made adequate profits if you count the military and government subsidies[1].
Not only the Chinese government is deploying their own satellite internet, several other are too. Probably because its profitable.
I remember many rumours of Elon Musk in Moscow at the founding of SpaceX with former Pentagon people? Lots of other reports on military considerations of SpaceX. Hard to verify [2][3].
[1] https://spacenews.com/spacex-providing-starlink-services-to-...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3082067/Russ...
[3] https://spacenews.com/first-satellite-for-chinese-g60-megaco...
He settled on founding SpaceX on the flight back because after the oligarchs lead him around a bunch with no intention of actually negotiating a sale, they straight up spat at him.
I regularly go over 1TB in a month without throttling on the standard plan...
I'd like to pay that kinda money for transit in sub Saharan Africa.
We don't all live in Ashburn and Frankfurt.
Some people are connected only via Intelsat and OneWeb
As for starlink throttling. There's people doing multiple TB per month every month. Go try that on your residential Viasat, HughesNet or Eutelsat plan
Transit is only expensive when you're small. What makes you think it's a big part of operational cost? Or something to base the retail price on? You likely spend more on power and staff
In Europe, starlink buys virtual or real l2 transport circuits and carries traffic to Frankfurt. They use lasers to carry traffic too when they don't have ground stations like in Kazakhstan
You can't afford to use Iridium to watch Netflix if you could even get enough bandwidth