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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is for the "aviation plan" which already requires six-digits equipment.

Yeah, for regular people they're just starting to suddenly charge $1,500 fees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1uklz4q/starlink_...

> He then reviewed my billing history and account details, confirmed that my service address had never actually changed, and determined that nothing had been moved. As a result, he issued a full refund.

Yeah but it still sounds like $1,500 demand fee was not a mistake, charging OP was the mistake.

People first mentioned these fees at like $100... now you can go to Costco, grab a Starlink, and they'll randomly ask for $1,500 to actually start service.

Congestion is a thing when each node needs to go to space, but it also feels like they're cashing in on years of "just move to a cabin in the woods and work off Starlink"... once you've done that they have you by the balls even worse than a typical ISP.

Isn't this fee specifically before they have you by the balls?

Not unless you had a potential $1500 fee top of mind before you moved...

Wanna guess if Starlink is advertising how insane these fees have gotten?

Let me guess... if you put the address into their handy text box, they tell you exactly what the demand surcharge is going to be for that location?

I tried it, and would you look at that, I was right.

I guess if you buy an entire house without checking to see what it costs to get internet service at that location, then you might be in a tough spot. Hard to blame it on anyone else though.

> I guess if you buy an entire house without checking

We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.

https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/elon-musk-cha...

Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.

They're not applying these retroactively. (They did so in the reddit link above, but that was a mistake that they fixed.) The only way you'd have this problem is if you check before you buy, see that it's not there, buy the place, then move in and find out that a surcharge was added in the meantime. That would suck, but I suppose it's a risk you run if you don't lock in your deal ahead of time, and you choose to move somewhere with only one good provider.

> Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans

This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!

I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!

What's the alternative? That anyone should just be able to be free to launch whatever into space or build whatever towers and have it blast whatever RF emissions it wants whenever and however? Sounds like a quick way to make the bands entirely unusable.

I'll go ahead and start a wireless home internet service. I'll just set my transmitters to 1575MHz, that'll be fine, its nice and quiet.

Except that’s not the argument being made or the problem being presented. The FCC does exactly what you asked by namesake, regulate communications.

> That's despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet's already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.

The article seems to be arguing that the FCC, whose namesake is exactly what you described, should be doing the namesake of the EPA and the FAA in an attempt to stop Starlink from creating a constellation.

You're exactly right, you can know you're getting fucked in the ass by Elon before you get fucked in the ass by Elon.

I don't go that way, but you do you.

I have good fiber, no need for Starlink. If I did, I might complain about the surcharge, but it would be hard to argue they tried to hide it.

If you're privileged enough to work a six-figure tech job while engaging in a homesteader larp in a "cabin in the woods", you can probably afford the fee. So can "off-grid" YouTuber grifters.

It's like everyone feels entitled to something they didn't know existed a few years ago.

People feel entitled to the advertised rate structure. Was there anywhere in the promo material that you might get slapped with $1500 connection fees?

If you are not big tech, that’s a lot of money. For the home in the middle of nowhere, $1500 could be more than you would pay in monthly rent. Plenty of rural people without access to good internet were hoping for Starlink to save them from garbage DSL connection options.

I go to their home page, click "get started," and it asks me where I want service. If I put in a place with a congestion surcharge, then it shows me on the next page. In fact, you have to pay it up front to order service. Seems advertised to me. If you don't want to pay it, then you don't have to use their service.

> congestion surcharge

I can't wait until our urban cable-modem and DSL providers pick up those "congestion surcharge" ideas! (FCC tariffs prevent this, right?)

They already do to run you service.

In the case of FWA they just say no.

They've generally chosen to go with bandwidth caps and throttling instead. Different ways of managing the shared resource.

I'm not really sure what people want here. Capacity is limited. They're adding more as fast as they can, to the point that they've launched more satellites than everyone else has combined in history. But it takes time. Until capacity meets demand, there are going to be limitations, one way or another. At least they are actively adding capacity, unlike some ISPs I've had with old infrastructure that couldn't handle modern demands and just left it that way.

I'm sure people would be complaining just the same if they had no surcharge but throttled everybody, or imposed strict data limits, or stopped accepting new customers entirely in congested areas.

Back in the day when analog modems were becoming obsolete, there was a hue and cry from broadband enthusiasts that cable modem technology was inferior infrastructure. These folks all agreed that DOCSIS and cable modems would suffer crippling congestion in neighborhoods. That your cable modem's bandwidth would be shared bandwidth, shared on a medium with all your neighbors up to that head-end, and that this shared medium would inevitably be oversold many times over, and that cable-modem ISPs could never possibly meet bandwidth demands on these local networks.

In contrast, DSL technology was sold as "never congested, never shared": that is, your copper pairs would wire up directly to the wire center, and have a dedicated connection into the ISP's backbone (and that ISP was experienced in telecommunications, rather than the entertainment industry) and therefore, DSL was always superior due to its lack of shared mediums.

It was a weird argument, because inevitably, every provider's core network is shared to some degree, and cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary. Conversely, DSL also had its strategies for aggregation, overselling, and shared media. But a lot of people believed those stories about topology myths.

Personally, I switched from ADSL to cable modem over 18 years ago, and I haven't regretted it. Very stable, always available and reliable, and plenty of bandwidth to spare, for my applications.

> cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary

I've lived in and had friends live in apartments with absolutely terrible noisy neighbor problems on coax networks. Too much junk plugged in making all kinds of noise on the same run making internet services close to useless. DSL infrastructure lost out to cable at the start in that area so it got practically no upgrades since it was first implemented. While far more reliable it was ancient speeds at even higher prices.

It seems like it largely took 5G home internet actually being a thing in those areas for the cable companies to start fixing those buildings and rooting out the problems.

Cable modem congestion and line quality issues definitely vary greatly on the operator and the actual location installed at. A cheap old apartment building filled with poor residents is likely to have abysmal line quality. A well-off neighborhood of single family homes probably has no problems with line quality at all.

It's a lot easier to upgrade the capacity at a central office than it is to upgrade an entire neighborhood. Plenty of cable infrastructure was built out when it was just a broadcast (multicast?) medium and the only concern was making sure signal strength was adequate at all receivers. If you repurpose that wiring for emulated point-to-point transmission, there may not be a whole lot for each individual.

Random example, my house has fiber and cable available. The internet plans are similar, except fiber offers 30x higher upload speeds, which is a direct consequence of better topology.

Boo hoo.... these same people were previously faced with $40,000 connection fees for Comcast and Verizon to trench a cable 1/2 mile to their property so $1500 seems like a pittance.

Look, friends of mine did this, they bought a country place so they can live the dream and write software in the sticks.

Next thing you know they're drilling new wells and installing a generator to support the fantasy while the bills pile up. When you bring modern conveniences to rural life it costs money.

So we should let companies do what ever anti-consumer practices they want, because you don't like the group they are doing it to?

Should a car company be allowed to charge you an extra fee every time you have a passenger?

If you need a specialized amphibious vehicle to get to your shack in the woods, it's not anti-consumer if it costs you more than a Mitsubishi Mirage.

A few days ago people were telling me the Starlink was brilliant because it gave small African villages with no mains electricity an internet connection to share.

This kind of behaviour does rather dampen the value proposition for such people.

Do you think tech bros who voluntarily choose to live in the woods should pay the same subsidized price as a rural African schoolhouse? Equity and all that.

It doesn't matter what I think in this case (I have already decided to not give Musk any money), what matters here is what Musk thinks and does, and how the actual real market reacts to that.

I don't think Mr Musk cares, do u?

The world is more than rich tech bros living in the woods. Normal income people also wanted to use this service without being bankrupted.

Rural homes do have roads that can be reached on a rusty pickup.

So not his service address, but a slightly different latitude/longitude would have received that.

His address would have received it too, if he was starting new service. It's only for new customers, they're not hitting existing customers with the charge. The error was that putting in the address made it look like he had moved, which counts as new service.

It sounds like this was a bug where slight updates to geolocation data (his address updated its physical location, probably to be more accurate) triggered a "location moved" process. Annoying, but not indicative of a new policy.

Starlink should probably reverse course on this however, it's one thing to pay 10k for up to 20 guests on a small private jet vs a company like Delta with a fleet of 747s. Charge Delta 20k, charge this guy 10k.

Why would they not charge as much as possible? Who else is launching satellites? He’s got one of the biggest moats I’ve ever seen.

There are quite a few providers of inflight wifi via satellite (or even cellular towers). Speeds are not usually as high as Starlink but it is ridiculous to say they have zero competition.

You also have Amazon building a constellation, OneWeb with one already in place (though not available for retail customers), and a Chinese one under construction.

I don't know who else is launching satellites, but many airlines do offer wifi, often via partnerships with telco companies. It's just expensive and slow.

So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.

> The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.

When it comes to internet, this IS the moat.

Passengers who want en route internet will demand it. The cost won't matter because that will be expensed. They will want the performance.

Amazon Leo has about 350 in orbit now, on their way to 7,500.

ASTS - though I think their satellites are supposed to connect to phone hardware

Also, not everyone in "aviation" is either an airliner or a 20 seat private jet. Joe Piston flying his two seater Cessna that cost him about as much as a new Toyota is not ever going to be paying Starlink's aviation price.

They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.

Joe Piston probably has enough on his plate flying his 2-seater without global 1Gbps entertainment-on-demand or executing trades on his brokerage account while his team of financiers crunch the numbers in row 2.

Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.

https://starlink.com/business/aviation?srsltid=AfmBOoqiIuBL1...

Of course a pilot is not going to trading stocks while flying, but there are plenty of safety reasons to have in-cockpit connectivity, including weather, notams, long-range comms with their destination, and so on. Not to mention convenient Internet for a passenger on a long flight, who themselves might want to trade their stocks.

These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.

Some of these Cesnas have 4 seats. Wife in copilot seat on an ipad, and the kids in the back playing COD on their Steam Decks.

Whats the point of taking passengers if they aren't going to be paying attention. Leave them on the ground and take someone who actually enjoys the experience.

As a Joe Piston, the starlink pricing constant-whipsaw has been really annoying.

I love the tech. It's truly game-changing. And there is no competitor right now.

I bought my mini dish for $400 or so. I've paid $250/mo, $65/mo, $250/mo again, now $200/mo, and on standby for $5/mo and now $10/mo. Don't get me started on the speed-limit and bandwidth-metering games they've played along the way.

I literally have no idea from month to month what the thing will cost. It's still awesome. But there are thousands of butthurt pilots who bought the dish at 65/mo (and many made 100W PD power upgrades, self included, for another few hundred) and got raised to 250/mo immediately.

It's not so much the cost anymore as the principle of a completely unhinged vendor. Bezos' version will have a bunch of ready buyers if he can stick to a price for longer than a Ketamine high.

> Starlink should probably reverse course on this

Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.

That 20 guests on a PJ are probably worth more than a fully booked 747. Price has always been set based how much customers are willing pay, not based on the value it creates.

They also recently doubled the price of the standby plan

Furnishing low-latency, broadband connectivity to private aircraft. The Challenger 350 noted in the article stickers north of $10M

For comparison,

If you live in a $300,000 home and pay $100/month for internet you’re paying 0.4% per year for the service.

If you own a $15,000,000 jet and pay $20,000/month for internet you’re paying 1.6% per year for the service.

By this comparison, we might say private jet owners are paying 4x more for their internet on their plane.

They are attempting to juice revenue across all product cohorts, this is simply another datapoint. Customers are captive until there are more connectivity options.

“Juice?” As in they have the best product by a wide margin and are charging a totally fair price for it that reflects demand. Nobody flying private cares about the price of Starlink.

It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.

The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.

Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!

SpaceX has a monopoly on high speed satellite internet. They will extract as much as they can from customers with said monopoly until there is a competitor. Doesn't sound like we're talking past each other except perhaps you might be a fan and I am not (specifically, extractionist monopolist behavior).

Don’t think anyone except Peter Thiel and Hasbro will argue that Monopoly is a good thing. ;-)

SpaceX has made the investments/innovation to better-serve the satellite internet market that already had players in it; HughesNet, Viasat, Iridium / Globalstar. Those were the price-gouging Oligopolist incumbents who Starlink is disrupting with a 10x better service for considerably cheaper.

Totally agree that SpaceX doubling the price from $10k/month to $20k looks really bad especially if they’re doing it to existing customers.

But the way I see this (as a non-private-jet-traveler) is: Starlink is doing a “Robin Hood” and making the Rich (who can all easily afford it) pay for the expansion of the service which will benefit all the rest of customers. And if the 0.01% decide to switch to an alternative supplier, that’s good for competition. So in a way it’s anti-monopolist. ;-)

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