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...