ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
70% Positive
Analyzed from 3959 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#starlink#more#price#service#spacex#plan#pay#internet#need#https
Discussion (165 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25b (depending on bond length in years 2031,33,36,46 and 2056)
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
So huge amounts needed continuously.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-spcx-stock-free-f...
But there are many ai companies!
/s, but only kinda
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1uklz4q/starlink_...
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.
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!
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
I've tent camped a lot on forest service land (and BLM land) both out west and in the east. Generally having arrived there by human power. Not once have I been confronted with a situation where the internet would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever.
but it isn't just about harm, as i said "convenience". i like being able to download detailed maps for trail hiking on-demand, and being off-grid and still able to be working (as my job requires me to be online).
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.
If you had a choice between Fiber or Starlink, you’d choose Fiber.
So as traditional ISPs improve service and coverage, Starlink becomes less in demand.
Starlink would only make sense if the world was not getting more and more concentrated around densely populated areas.
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
I only get 10G per month of bandwidth but I rarely use it since I have a fiber connection that is mostly reliable.
It might be a grandfathered plan because they don't list it anywhere I can see:
Edit: turns out this is a feature/mode and not a plan:https://starlink.com/na/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They must have changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
I kinda wanted to get one of those for standby, but the price seemed too good to be true, so I figured they'd either eliminate it or raise the price.
A lot of open source software uses this model - free for everyone, but if you're a company that wants support then you have to pay for it, and that covers the development for everyone
Are you sure this is negotiable?
Price on things like kitchen appliances, furniture often negotiable - you just have to ask.
My wife: (good customer) if I guy two pairs of shoes I want 2nd pair at 50% - them "ok"
My wife: what will you give me if I buy this (expensive briefcase)? - them "$100 gift card"
I got an extra $150 of a sheepskin coat at a going out of business sale just by asking
Then we could properly value the IPO in the quadrillions. (I know you know this is ridiculous. But investors clearly are riding high on the tulip mania).
Musk doesn't need to deliver to keep valuation up. We've seen him doing pretty well stringing people along indefinitely with "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" self driving capabilities.
A lot of their revenue is also from renting out GPUs to more productive AI companies, so depending on how long that game can keep on going (getting access to GPUs before other companies), it could last for a while too.
And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Technologically? Maaaaaybe a slight ping time reduction in certain configurations compared to terrestrial fiber, because even with multiple hops lasers can still be faster than fiber.
Super-expensive, questionably economic way to do it though.
Both of which strike me as poor arguments. We are in a short term energy crunch. I expect within five years that most of the energy problems will be resolved and the eye watering financials of launching a GPU into space will look absurd
Governments also do not like to cede authority, so I find it hard to believe that they will not claim jurisdiction over any business operating within their borders (all of those ground stations).
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
I'd see this as an opportunity.
When companies buy a service, they normally agree a bespoke contract for 5 years or so and a fixed price for additional units, often with an option of a further x years period too.
So sounds like there wasn't a bespoke contract as lawyers should have picked it up.
If you are operating in North America for example, your service is going from $10k to $12.5k. Still a 25% increase, which is not fun, but I think a lot of the customers affected by this will fit into this category. You only need the $20k plan if your aircraft travels between their roughly-continental regions.
Nicholas Air, quoted in the article, appears to have no need for the $20k plan and should not use it.
He will extract as much as possible, whenever possible.
https://www.ft.com/content/3a023b95-66c3-41e1-b0ce-df752a499...
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
These parts are likely pushing the best minds away from Musk these days. Not sure when that turned, perhaps Cybertruck?
[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave
ouch.
I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.
so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.
---
All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
TBF that's like 70% of the US, large parts of the Southern Hemisphere in general, much of China, India, Russia, etc.
But yes, StarLink is best when it has some user density but not too much user density. It will be this way until... probably forever.
If I go camping? StarLink. Otherwise no cell/internet service.
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmazonLeo/comments/1uupd3w
will they offer aviation suitable plans?
Not everything has to be some little gripefest.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/archive/newsroom/cfpb-orders...
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.