I used Starlink for the first time the other week on a Narrowboat holiday in remote (at least by UK standards) South Wales. I was honest pretty impressed.

We're considering buying a motorhome in the next couple of years and my experience with Starlink made me think it was a practical necessity going forward.

This kind of constant meddling in the pricing structure makes me want to not touch it with a barge pole though. Yes, satellites are expensive, but that's not an excuse for not coming up with a viable business plan and pricing structure that you can stick with over a reasonable term.

Quite a lot of people are using it domestically in the UK as well, after getting told it will take 3 years/£2000 to run fibre optic to their house.

£2000! Yikes, is that even legal? That could 20+ months of Internet service for an installation charge.

I mean picked from thin air, but if you're down some weird spur road and they have to put extra poles in to run the cable it's of that order of magnitude.

I'm thinking of getting it in the wilds of central London where I have an "Openreach Stop Sell order for traditional copper services" but no fiber or a date for getting that.

It's not as good as full fibre, but it's much better than copper.

[delayed]

It was like £50 for me, but a neighbour needs two extra telegraph poles installed before the cable can reach him, and he was quoted high hundreds or low thousands in pounds for the fibre installation.

So be honest about that up front.

Not get people to pay a lot of money for the hardware based on decent plans and quotas, and then jack up pricing and restrict features almost immediately. It's a bait and switch.

Typical telco behavior though. Cox cable, Verizon, AT&T, so on. They even sold “price lock guarantee” as a feature, often a time limited promotion.

You don't become the richest person in the world by treating your customers well.

What are you talking about? That’s very nearly the opposite of true. Customers pay for delivered value. They’re voluntary exchanges.

Customers don't pay for delivered value, they pay for what they assume the value to be after the purchase. A huge part of the global economy is focused on distorting these assumptions.

Look, you're not going to convince me by pointing at econ 101 models. There are tons of additional factors that shape customer decisions - for example, you could keep promising self-driving cars next year™ for a decade.

No, if companies consistently fail to deliver value, people stop buying their products. As much as you want to believe people are buying Teslas because they're being duped, the truth is they're selling so well because even absent true self driving, they're the best car for a very large number people for most use cases.

> No, if companies consistently fail to deliver value, people stop buying their products.

Why are we suddenly talking about "companies consistently fail[ing] to deliver value"? That is unrelated to my initial comment.

Or are you trying to argue that every company is treating their customers well, as long as they don't "fail to deliver value"?

Maybe I misunderstand -- When you say, categorically, that "you don't become the richest person in the world by treating your customers well," what do you mean? I can think of many, many companies that I would attribute their success primarily to treating their companies well. And at least in my experience, that would include Tesla, Starlink, and xAI.

I'd like to try, but I fear that our value systems might be too fundamentally different for me to successfully bridge that gap. It'd be very helpful if I could first understand how you interpreted my initial statement, because otherwise we'll most likely talk past each other:

- In your eyes, what types of actions/situations are examples of "companies not treating their customers well"?

- Same as above, but for "companies treating their customers well"?

Customers always take the Faustian bargain.

Over the long term surely StarlinK capital costs scale fairly linearly with the user base. And the benefit to the user of space layers is marginal when they are already paying for a specific level of bandwidth.

I'm currently paying more in rural UK for a base ADSL (10Mbps down, 1Mbps up) than I would pay for the 100Mbps Starlink option. There's no sign of fibre arriving here, but if it did, it'd probably be even more expensive. It makes a lot of sense to switch to Starlink.