> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this

One word: marketing.

A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.

They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.

Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.

There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.

It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.

I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.

And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.

And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.

Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.

I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it

RV is a great use case but a tiny market. For fixed broadband the others are cheaper most everywhere in the U.S. that people actually live.

The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.

Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.

If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.

This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite from intracell interference. (Ships, planes, RV, while nice are tiny markets by comparison.)

But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.

I live in a city. Like a large number of Americans, I had one broadband provider available for 20 years. (Something like 75% of us have 1 or 2).

The price was high and the service was bad. I struggled to reliably achieve 20mbs at $80/mo.

Starlink is better than that, and it’s millions of people. 5g home internet is slow to spread here too.

Their market is large.

Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.

Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.

Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.

That math doesn't need to mask sense, it's always been about Golden Dome.

Complete nonsense. They didn't start in 2015 and didn't get investment into Starlink from Google because hopefully some presidnet would want Goldon Dome in the future. Starlink is a good business and has plenty of military value without Goldon Dome.

Australia we just turned 3G off now there are large black spots everywhere for hours.

Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere

Residential prices:

100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.

200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.

400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.

A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.

I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.

In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).

Starlink costs around the same as business mobile Internet.

Or see T-Mobile away

> their ungodly expensive product

Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?

Their competitors isn’t other satellite in most cases. It’s fiber, 5G and so on.

It's cheaper then fibre here in Australia. Especially rural.

Wow that sucks that Starlink is cheaper than Fiber at the same speed.

Starlink isn't expensive by those standards either.

Probably depends where. It is for sure more expensive than fiber with the same speed where I live.

Starlink's main goal isn't consumer internet, it's being the backbone for Golden Dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

> Of course that's terrifying...

Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.

For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.

So, worth it?

Man this dumb conspiracy again ...

This is widely reported and documented, including by Reuters,

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spa...

This article in now way what so ever proves your point.

$39/month for 100Mbps in the middle of nowhere is spectacularly cheap.

United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think?

Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.

Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.

About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.

Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.

But you need to give personal information which also has value.

More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?

Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)

The people concerned with that hypothetical can use a VPN.

At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)

But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

> But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

Privacy filters are a thing.

you're literally an inch away from someone.

they are essentially looking head on at it.

that may work for business class, but not economy.

privacy filters aren't magic.

Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.

You realize you have to give them the same informaron to even step foot on the plane?

That's why I exclusively pay cash and don't show an ID when I fly /s

> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free

There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.

On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.

There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).

https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...

What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.

Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.

Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.

I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.

Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?

It’s pretty good, but the latency is inherently high since Viasat is in GEO.

~600ms ping times vs ~40ms on Starlink

Starlink failed it's Delta Demo.

The article is online.

Airplanes are one of the places I feel happily disconnected from being online. Never used in-flight WiFi even when my company would have paid for it.

It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.

Delta has had high speed internet for years on their flights. I’m Platinum Medallion

It could just be the ESPN/gym membership/AAA business model. $ from every single passenger is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.

> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals

The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.

Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)

T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.

Only if the airplane uses much slower ground based Gogo (?). I use it every now and then when taking the 45 minute flight from ATL to my parents home in South GA

give the customers the complete experience and they will subscribe.

IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.

And show ads for it on the inflight entertainment

The built in entertainment systems are so full of ads, that I much prefer the planes with no seat back screens. I've always already got my own devices which I use to entertain myself, whether the airline is providing advertainment or not.

And no one interrupts the movie I fell asleep watching on my iPad in order to push a credit card application at max PA volume.

Really ironic given that they pulled the rug on general aviation usage.

It’s too difficult to distinguish between a terminal in small GA aircraft and something with destructive payload. Commercial aircraft are few and controllable.

Most of the airlines I have been on charge per megabyte. Having internet for the whole trip is a huge value add for the airline.

Delta has had free high speed satellite internet for years. I’m going to start flying Southwest more this year but they also advertise free internet. I don’t know how fast it is.

I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.

Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.

By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.

Correct, I’ve had Starlink in several long haul flights over the past 6 months and it’s already becoming an expectation, ie makes the flights without it noticeably worse. I’m not sure whether everyone gets it for free, though, it was my understanding that it’s complementary for business class but a paid add on for economy. But once you have it, it’s fast and stable.

It’s available on some ships—not free but pretty reasonably priced. Debated last time I went trans- Atlantic but $20 per day seemed fair.

Free (for now). Introducing or raising costs for a previously free or cheap service is normal practice for start ups.