This shift is already happening, look at property values over the last 1-2 years.

My guess is that enough rich people moving into the middle of nowhere will cause the government to pay for terrestrial solutions ("incentivize") within the next 10 or so years.

If enough rich people move to rural counties and get involved in politics, they can create public utility districts to build open access dark fiber which 3rd party ISPs can ride on.

What are the chances of Starlink getting worse as adoption grows and available bandwidth gets saturated?

You're only competing with your neighbors, since different regions connect to different ground stations. If you live in a rural location it's unlikely the user density will ever be high enough to cause a problem.

If you live in a dense metro area it will probably fill up very quickly - but then again Starlink is not really designed for those locations, which probably already have good connectivity.

100%. they're nowhere near the satellite/user ratio they're planning.

Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?

I pay like $94/month for DSL in a rural area. That includes a (mandatory) land line, and I'm "guaranteed" 10/1 Mbps--which I don't get.

The only other options, until Starlink launches in my area, are traditional satellites. My neighbor previously had one of those, and he had an 8GB cap per MONTH. Plus the ping time averaged like 600ms.

I'm not even mad about the price of $94. Internet is way, way worth it. The quality of the connection sucks, though. I would pay $200 for Starlink once it's reliable. I'm not actually sure what my limit is, but it's pretty high, because rural internet is painful

the economics of consumer grade oversubscribed geostationary are terrible - it costs something like $200 million to build and launch a 5500 kg satellite into geo orbit, it'll almost certainly die in 15 years (Standard lifespan), and its aggregate capacity is TINY

actual dedicated 1:1 geostationary network capacity costs at a minimum $1600 per Mbps per month each direction (eg: 2 Mbps down x 0.5 Mbps up circuit would easily be $3500/mo)

In Australia, it's $140 / month, plus the capex of $700 for the dish, which obviously won't work on any other provider. I suspect resale on that device, if the carrier allows it, would be reasonable, but I don't expect I'd be moving away from this service.

People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that terrestrial services there are better spec'd and cheaper.

For me (in AU) it's compelling because I otherwise have an option of a 3G yagi / booster (nearest tower is 15km away, service is awful normally, but unusable in storms, frequently highly contended, etc), dial-up (there's very few places that still offer such a service, and just the landline connection fee is $40 / month to start with), or geo-stationary satellite (what I've just moved away from after 2+ years, which has > 600ms RTT to the nearest capital city, and a max downstream of 25Mbps, which is also frequently highly contended during peak times.

The 100W / hour usage is frustrating, and claims of electricity being 'just 10c / kWh' are quaint, I guess coming from well serviced parts of EU / US? Here most people are up for 30c (AUD) / kWh, and if on ToU that can go up to 60c during peak (2pm through 8pm). I've got solar, so on average I'm powering this 'for free' 25% of the time.

>but unusable in storms

Dumb Q - is satellite any better in a storm?

I would guess there is less interference between a ground station and a satellite than between two ground stations. Two main reasons:

1) The storm would have to be right on top of the ground station to be in the line of sight when talking to a satellite. For the 3g case, the storm could be anywhere along the 15km between the two ground stations.

2) Storms typically cover a larger area horizontally than they do vertically, so for most angles, communicating with a satellite should go through less of the cloud than horizontal 3g communication. I'm sure there could be storms where this is not true (eg a tall thunderstorm directly above the ground station), but my guess is that such storms are more rare.

Storms, and just heavy rain, consistently send our satellite internet offline. This is Australian “sky muster plus” pointing at a geosynchronous satellite at a higher orbit than starlink.

To augment the other two responses here with some anecdata -- yes, storms would knock off my geostationary satellite connection in ways I didn't fully understand (it might just have been a huge bump in attempted utilisation for all I could tell at the consumer level).

Starlink during storms, and we've have a half dozen big ones since I got this service 4 months ago, seems to do more re-acquires during those events (several seconds of drop-outs) but I'm not seeing significantly lengthy outages.

The dish is still sitting on some concrete blocks on the ground, so it may simply be that it's wobbling more during the wilder winds.

rough calculation in US dollars, if a starlink terminal is 100W constant load and electricity costs $0.30 per kWh, it would be about a $22.32 extra on the monthly electrical bill.

in your case about $16.74 if you subtract 25% for the estimate of benefit from your solar (grid tied?) kWh going back to the grid

That sounds about right.

For the average Australian user, it means you add ~ $200-350 / year to your effective ISP cost. Not end of world for most, but certainly not trivial for all, either.

The regrettable history of Australian internet provisioning (specifically our national broadband network) and electricity pricing (specifically the rorts and corruption, and higher-than-rest-of-world pricing) are described much more eloquently by others.

That’s not expensive.

I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.

FYI Sonic is now offering 10GB/s for $40/month in parts of the Bay Area.

10GB/s or 10gb/s?

I stand corrected, it's Gb/s

It's not a replacement for suburban internet. It's a way to pay just 50% more (in Australian pricing) for something that offers way more options.

In Italy an average Gbps fiber connection costs about 25€ (about 28$) per month which is insanely cheap compared to other countries.

This also means that, at least for us, 99$ (88€) per month for such a thing is a lot more at the end of the year (+756€). I hope they’ll eventually adjust that price for different markets because at the moment it’s not even competitive in my area.

it's not meant to be competitive in areas that have existing reliable and competitively priced terrestrial wire line infrastructure (fiber, docsis3 or docsis3.1 on coax cable, short reach VDSL2 or g.fast on old copper phone lines, short reach WISPs capable of 150Mbps+). it's for areas that have none of the previously mentioned last mile access technologies available to each house.

That's not terrible. I pay something like $140/mo for 1gbps (in reality I've never seen speeds >300mbps) with no data cap. $100 for ~100mbps with no data cap is reasonable to me.

You know you can like get them to fix that right?

How? In the fine print for most of these contracts it says something like “up to 1Gb, actual rates may vary based on network load” or something similar.

Call them up, say you are not getting the speeds, then when the tech shows up, simply don't let him leave until you can verify a speed test at that rate.

If you get a good tech they will help you, you may get a dud, in which case you simply have to call them up and work the system again.

It's totally doable, I've done it dozens of times at every dwelling I've inhabited. I'm currently on their 1GB plan, and I do get 1.4Gbps down (they recently upped their provisioning rate, and with a newer modem with 1 2GB link on it, with a suitable router [I run the UDM Pro] it works).

how?

Not just expensive. IIRC, the receiving dish and associated gear burns 120W or something like that.

That's still only around $100 a year in electricity assuming 10 cents/kWh.

In Germany, regular prices scratch 30 cents/kWh, so you're looking at another 25€ a month just to run the dish.

A regular unlimited Gigabit Uplink runs 40€-80€ a month, with hardware included and a power usage in the range of 10W.

But, unfortunately, anywhere you have a Garden large enough to host starlink, you probably won't have anything near that speed available, so it's still pretty competitive.

:(

Living with more space though, you can offset that with solar pretty easily.

about the same as comcast in the US...

Wouldn't you want to wait for at least two providers before rearchitecting your life around a product like that?

Question: How is starlink going to be a game changer in ways publicly funded infrastructure (either traditional cables or cables + 5G towers) aren’t?

Your anecdote doesn’t really cover “game changer” since land outside of suburbia is pretty either scarce, big and expensive, underdeveloped, etc. and not many people want to live there (and I doubt fast broadband is the only thing holding people back).

I honestly don’t think starlink is useful for that many people. Personally I would categorize it as a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals (and maybe even smaller number of industrial workers which work onsite in remote locations). I have a hard time seeing it doing anything more.

Our experience differs from your view. We recently moved from the Bay Area to the Sierra Foothills, near Sonora. There is plenty of land with homes already in place, as well as land suitable for new construction. Land is available in sizes from 10,000 sq. ft. lots to 1,200 acres and everywhere in between. Electricity, propane, and water are commonly available. As a rule of thumb, prices are ~0.25xthe Bay Area.

Although Comcast is a thing in town, most of the otherwise eminently suitable locations have no cable access. The choices are old-style satellite or Starlink.

We have met an increasing number of people who have left the Bay Area and moved to our area. Nearly all of these are remote tech workers. They have generally held their noses and signed up for geosynchronous satellite while waiting for their Starlink service. Those who have transitioned to Starlink are very happy they made the move when they did.

I think Starlink will prove useful to so many people that it will increase pricing for rural real estate.

Starlink is incredibly useful for areas that didn't have traditional Internet. It's not perfect but it makes working in rural areas possible where it wasn't before.

It's not even rural. It's less than 3 hours from 3 major cities (and within an hour of a minor one), in a popular weekend vacation spot, and yeah, it's pretty mountainous but it's also got plenty of infrastructure already.

It is amazing how our traditional telcos have failed us. Buildout of broadband was fully-funded by the government in the 90s, and it flopped; They took the money and never built anything. These communities still do not have access to reliable broadband as it was defined then.

I so agree with you.

Comcast could have built out service in so many of our current residential areas, but chose not to. For no apparent reason but that it cost capex.

There was so much funding to extend internet access to rural areas. None of the major vendors engaged these funds and used them to provide capacity.

If Starlink succeeds, I'll raise a glass to the memory of Comcast and others.

> ...increasing number of people who have left the Bay Area and moved to our area. Nearly all of these are remote tech workers.

spot on:

>> a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals

Only question is, will the money from this small group of wealthy individuals be sufficient to pay for the full system? We'll see in about 4 years the latest, when satellites will start falling down, and will have to be replaced by new ones...

Money from a small group of wealthy individuals might be sufficient to pay for this system and perhaps few competitors. However it is quite a long shot at calling that a game changer. Quite the contrary this might be a game stopper for a larger number of poorer folks in rural communities that have been asking for traditional broadband for decades and now have to battle the “Technology will solve it” issue their local politicians will inevitably bring up now.

Hey neighbor, we moved into town so Comcast is available. Other options will be great, though!

there are a number of rural areas in the USA that politically show very low likelihood of getting something like a proper last mile broadband service built by wireline infrastructure any time soon (fiber and GPON or active ethernet). some rural counties in eastern WA are the exception.

Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements. Perhaps the price will come down as operators proliferate and this will be affordable for these communities. But I still fail to see how this is a game changer.

Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower is very possible today, and frankly not that expensive for a country like USA. I think you undercount the political feasibility a bit. Politicians in the USA make a huge buzz about serving rural communities, infrastructure is a political buzzword at the moment. A good politician could easily capitalize on rural broadband. They don’t even have to be that well intentioned since they could take some lobby money from the telecom companies and bid out the infrastructure build out with conveniently specific requirements for contractors their family just so happens to own stock in.

You seem to have very strict definition of rural that doesn't map to how the FCC or Census Bureau define the term. I live in an area that is very clearly 'rural', most of it has been built on in the past 30-40 years and the average home price within a few miles of me is ~$400k. I live by engineers, doctors, architects, technologists and none of us have had anything but 10M DSL and Hughes satellite options for Internet in the past 15 years.

Yes everything you've said about the possibilities is technically true, but it hasn't happened and there is no evidence it will happen. The RDOF has awarded another provider funding to bring fiber to within a few miles of my place but not directly to me.

Meanwhile I've been on Starlink since last February. I just checked and I'm getting 110M/12M with a 28ms ping time, which is 10x what I was getting for effectively the same price. Not only that, if I want to go on the road I can pack that little dish and take that bandwidth with me just about anywhere in the US. If I was broke I could pool funds with a few neighbors and we could split the cost.

With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?

Now my notion of under-served rural America might be biased. I have traveled quite a bit around rural America and by far the most people in under-served communities were on the poorer side. Now I did definitely see affluent communities with minimal infrastructure (particularly in California), but that was very much the exception (even in California).

> With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?

Your county would—and should—spend a few million dollars with some extra funding from your state and local telecom companies to drop a few 5G towers to pick up a few thousand more customers and voter happiness for sure. Your county counsel can call it something like Rural Broadband initiative and have a plan to bring a broadband connection to 30-70% of under-served rural households in the county before 2030. A good politician should be able to sell it even to city folks as serving the community.

that's true in terms of average income, but $110/mo USD for starlink is about the same as a 20GB quota per month consumer geostationary service that is absolutely a terrible and miserable experience (viasat/wildblue/hughesnet etc). Or at most, $10-20 more per month.

> Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements.

It's a utility. If it costs twice as much as elsewhere you still need to pay it, until it starts getting really difficult.

> How is starlink going to be a game changer in ways publicly funded infrastructure (either traditional cables or cables + 5G towers) aren’t?

Starlink exists.

People spend money on things that aren’t “game changers” all the time. A business can certainly exist while only offering a quality of life improvements to a small minority.

My brother just rebuilt a house up in Maine. Previously the house had 1Mbps (with a tailwind) DSL. They wouldn't even reinstall it and houses further down the road couldn't get it at all.

You could get a Verizon hotspot (and ration data). But Starlink is pretty good. Video streaming does stutter a bit--you're better off downloading. I could actually work up there which I couldn't really with the old DSL.

There's not enough satellites to be useful yet, terrestrial astronomy is still possible. They'd need to have ten times the current number to stop it, and that's not due to happen for a few years.

I reckon if they put their mind to it they could cause enough pollution to make cellphones unusable, maybe even open-air wifi. They're smart, I'm sure they have the technology, they could make the whole EM spectrum so dirty the whole sky would glow.