Starlink Is a Big Deal

Re:Starlink Is a Big Deal by chameleon_world on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @11:34PM (#22188858)

Contrary to what Musk & co's claims it doesn't look like this will help the people/countries who actually need access, at least not with the prices that they are saying they will charge. Someone scatter-plotted the GDP of countries and internet penetration, and it turns out none of the countries who need access can afford starlink internet. (There are many other similar calculations out there on the interwebs).

https://twitter.com/chmn_victor/status/1219721896075366403

Most likely this is mainly to be used by bankers and computer stock traders to buy and sell stocks even faster over the ocean.

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Re:Starlink Is a Big Deal by rictic on Thursday January 30, 2020 @12:17AM (#22189056)

Doesn't it also depend on how wealthy your neighbors are?

For an extreme example, an area with extremely low population (like the middle of the ocean), the bandwidth (at least surface to satellite bandwidth) will be wasted if no one is using it. The price could be much lower.

A poor community in a rich and population dense area probably would be priced out.

Will be interesting to see how it shakes out in practice. I could see it go both ways honestly.

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Re:Starlink Is a Big Deal by Veedrac on Thursday January 30, 2020 @09:58AM (#22191698)

Starlink will sell at pretty much whatever price it needs to, since serving data has effectively no marginal cost. The only unavoidable one is the ($300) base station, but people can share.

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