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Comment by matrix2003 | Hacker News Reader

matrix2003·

Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly cheap compared to Iridium. It’s still not cheap from where I’m sitting in my clapped out Honda Civic, though.

Edit: I think $250 for 50GB of truly global data. I can’t do the math right now, but it seems like a better deal at face value.

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$50/month, these days, if I'm not mistaken. (You can only use it abroad for two months at a time, but you can update your location as as far as I'm aware, and it's $/€ 50 in most places.)

Price wise, it's no comparison, but the two don't directly compete yet – power usage and antenna size of Iridium and Starlink are orders of magnitude apart (largely due to the L-band spectrum available to Iridium globally).

The higher rate gets you oceanic use, which is a big benefit of iridium.

You are correct that it can be $50, but AFAIK that’s a different plan that is land or near-land only.

Ah yes, good point.

I believe the $50 plan used to have a pay-per-GB option for offshore use – $2 or so per GB, compared to $5 and more per MB for the competitors. But even at 300 or so, it’s orders of magnitude better for high-bandwidth use cases.

> Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly cheap compared to Iridium.

They don't have sat-to-sat communications deployed yet, so they can work only near the ground stations.

Hmm? Starlink has had sat-to-sat active for a while now. They've been making a killing selling services to ships and planes lately.

The laser interlinks have been turned on.

They have sat-to-sat now. I was on a cruise ship this past summer that used starlink. I was able to get a consistent 3-5 mbps up/down in the middle of the ocean with nearest land at least several hundred miles away.

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