Sub 100 ms of ping is super good for space internet, but with 111 of Jitter it meant not much. With 9.2, 88 will always feel like sub 100, and that's indeed a huge quality of life.
I'm afraid it's mostly the opposite, a death rate improvement. I can't find the publication with the official soldier death toll numbers - not that you can trust any wartime publication - but the second highest death toll was for Ukrainian drone operators. The highest still is for Starlink terminal operators, mostly soldiers too. I spoke with a few while they where under fire and we both where scared as hell that they would target the Starlink dish (it has two very unique radio signatures) while we where video conferencing with it.
Your comment seems to contradict itself. The technology is so valuable that the GUR is upset Musk didn't provide it to them, but not so valuable that deployed units and operators would be targeted?
I think this war has demonstrated that Starlink is priceless.
Things chance quickly in a war, the situation is now (29 Februari 2024) very different. Starlinks mounted on drones by both sides, for example. Nato and US militairy paying for special Starlink. Jamming at 10Ghz-60Ghz.
I am bound by an NDA with an Intel Vice President and by an agreement with an ally of Nato military sources. Contact me directly and I'l be happy to point you to the sources that are not secret. You could located them yourself if you Google diligently.
Firstly, Starlink cables are 1 Gbps ethernet with PoE [1].
This means 53V DC power over thin twisted pair cables, after a few meters the voltage drops below 48V DC and the cables start showing up in infrared because they are heated by the electrical resistance. Standard Starlink cables can't reach further than +/- 30 meters reliably. Those 30 meters run to the wifi router where your power supply must be.
You certainly can't be mobile anymore with this setup.
We use optical fiber instead but this requires a very large, heavy and warm battery to stay very close to the Starlink dish while the operator can now be kilometers away. You can now disable the Starlink Wifi router but only if you patch the encrypted firmware and spoof the account credentials. SpaceX calls that illegal and will disable and brick your hardware as soon as they find out.
Doing this extensive conversion is only for very capable hackers and has been done by only three people on our planet, as far as I am aware [2][3].
If you need similar patching and optical wireing, we will be happy to eductate you, for a small fee.
Can you say how, specifically with regards to "receivers seeing it as white noise without knowing the timing"?
As I understand it, the same is true for e.g. DSSS (for receivers not knowing the spreading code), and the primary advantage of UWB is its precise ranging capability (due to its ability to reject multipath propagation errors and the generally high bandwidth, yielding better spatial resolution).
I studied ultra wideband decades before they started to write papers refering to UWB standard definitions [1] so I might be out of tune (pun intended) with current definitions.
A transceiver could use attosecond 10^−18, femtosecond 10^−15 picosecond 10^−12 or nanosecond 10^−9 pulses at very irregularly intervals. That seems (almost) random to any observer but not to a receiver which has pre-agreed those irregularly intervals with the transmitter (for example with quantum key distribution, with entangled particles). The receiver measures if there was a signal or not. It does not use power level, frequency, or phase (or a combination of these) of a sinusoidal wave but by generating radio energy at specific time intervals and occupying a large bandwidth, thus enabling pulse-position or time modulation.
Not just spacial distribution can be used.
You could use polarised photons, electron spin, etc.
In my wafer scale integration [2] I use very few free space photos to flip a 1 v transistor in an ultra wideband mode.
I refer you to [3] for [4] for a better explanation, even though ultra wideband is not mentioned specifically.
Contact me directly, I'll be happy to lecture for a few hours to answer your question.
The same is true for DSSS only within a relatively narrow frequency band, originally of at most a few tens of MHz, now up to a few hundred MHz.
For UWB, the energy of the signal is spread over a much wider frequency band, of at least a few GHz and up to tens of GHz. Therefore UWB behaves like a white noise with a much greater bandwidth than DSSS.
It is not difficult to jam the entire band that can be used by certain kinds of DSSS signals or to receive all of it and process it digitally to search for signals within it.
Such operations are much more difficult for the much greater bandwidth used by an UWB signal.
Ah, that makes sense, thank you! So if I understand it right, they'd be the same/very similar if we could do direct-sequence spreading over multiple GHz, but we can't, so we do UWB instead? Is the modulation just practically easier to achieve in hardware?
And regarding jamming resistance: Couldn't a jammer just transmit random pulses in the frequency band in question? Why is jamming harder than just transmitting a lot of useless data on the same channel using whatever modulation the targeted transmitter uses as well? Or is there just too much space (or rather, time) to cover with reasonable transmit power?
UWB radio transmits below the noise floor, you're going to have a hard time finding any signal there or even know if a signal is being transmitted. You can go crazy misidentifying noise combinations as signals. In that sense you need to know almost everything about it to intercept it.
That's the same for (wide) spectrum spreading though, right? Some of these signals are also below the noise floor before correlation, and you need to know the spreading code to detect them.
regular version, recent revision.
disabling wifi is a checkbox on the phone app not """extensive conversion is only for very capable hackers and has been done by only three people on our planet"""
English is not my native language, you might have taken me too literally.
You have to be a very capable hacker to modify all the different Starlink firmware of all the chips involved. There are dozens of reasons to do that, unrelated from disabling WiFi.
And no, a GUI check box has little relation to what the hardware actually does.
> There are dozens of reasons to do that, unrelated from disabling WiFi.
You're moving goal posts now. If the stock firmware/software now allows disabling Wi-Fi, you don't need to hack the hardware.
And if you can't trust the stock firmware, i.e. you have reason to assume that it's actively malicious (e.g. by turning the Wi-Fi back on randomly), how can you trust the hardware? Who's to say that it doesn't, e.g., have an undocumented transponder feature that replies to a specific type of interrogation?
I’m surprised that opening the router and physically disabling the wifi antenna is not a solution. I would understand that running the router in a faraday cage is not viable as the ethernet cable has to get from the router to the dish.
A faraday cage with a hole only big enough for an ethernet cable would almost certainly still block enough wifi that the signal would only be detectable for a few meters. Probably not very much would leak through the cable.
It would be dwarfed by the emanations from the, you know, space transmitter co-located with it. Locating the dish isn’t the issue, the proposal was using fiber to make the dish (detectable) and the operator (vulnerable) separated by distance.
For example, do you trust SpaceX to not relay your location to your enemy? Do you want to broadcast your identity at all if there can be a man-in-the-middle-attack? A dozen other reasons....
If you don't, should you be using a highly directional (Starlink achieves the capacity it does through spatial reuse allowed by directional antennas on both ends, so the satellites do need to know where you are pretty precisely), proprietary-hardware-requiring, inherently authenticated (for billing purposes), and generally very civilian focused satellite service?
A military service would probably use wider beams coming from the satellite, as well as different encryption (making it impossible to distinguish which terminal is being transmitted to on which beam and not using correlatable identifiers on unencrypted protocol layers at all).
Using civilian communications technology like cell phones has been a bad idea, as evidenced in the same conflict.
The problem isn't the firmware, it's the protocol.
If the protocol requires you to reveal your precise location to the network (so that satellite beams can correctly target you), how would you get around that using your own open firmware/hardware?
The same goes for authentication using (potentially) long-term stable or even public identifiers, as is the case for e.g. the IMSI with GSM (not sure if later 3GPP generations finally fixed that): A GSM network won't let you attach without revealing your IMSI over the radio interface at least once. You can spoof it, but then you won't get any service.
> Use Starlink dishes as phased array point to point links across 500 km without the v2 Satellites?
That's a completely different scenario than the one we're talking about here ("why can't military users relatively easily put some distance between the Starlink terminal and its users in a warzone?"), and one which I'd assume the military to have existing solutions for.
The entire terminal is one big antenna, by definition!
Are Starlink terminals really directional enough for EMI from an Ethernet port to be a bigger omnidirectional concern than the many watts of power they transmit skywards as part of their normal operation?
If I am following you correctly, disabling the wifi router is to avoid detection right? If so why not encase it an an RF pouch or RF shielding netting to block the signal?
Why? Worst case, couldn't you put the Starlink terminal, router, power supply and all in position A, together with a (worst case) Wi-Fi to fiberoptic Ethernet bridge running to position B?
The Starlink terminal is already a giant transmitter, after all.
Didn't the FTC just cut funding to Starlink in December for failing to meet the download speed targets? Seems like that decision was really premature, seeing as how they had years remaining to meet the targets and they're showing rapid improvement year-over-year.
I'm a little skeptical about that jitter comparison, I'd like to see more info. I don't see anything in this excellent report that sheds light on the difference (and honestly don't see that difference in the graphs.)
Mostly I'm curious how the hardware is the limiting factor here, I always assumed it was a combination of queueing in the Starlink infrastructure plus retransmits. Maybe a better antenna lowers the number of retransmits needed?
I don't have a proper jitter measure, but FWIW my Gen 1 Starlink in Grass Valley, CA has a round trip time (measured with IRTT) that varies from 30-60ms over minutes. That improved significantly in January 2024 after some change Starlink made. Previously it was more like 40-100ms.
First deployed Starlink start of 2021 as part of the beta, and it's remained a rock. Glad to see it continuing to evolve, and very much looking forward to how the network improves further once Starship starts letting them get up full size v2+ sats. But as someone who started with and is still running a bunch of the gen1 dishy's for various clients, I do regret that SpaceX chose to move away from (let alone improve) having the terminal by default be useful as a plain dedicated WAN with no pushing of their router at all. You could certainly use their router if you wanted, but could also just plug the power brick directly into a regular network and that was that (which is what we've done, generally via simple fiber translator). At least on the more expensive business version it'd be great to have native SFP or separate data plugs, power directly off a standard 12V terminal, etc, the way normal high performance outdoor networking gear works. It's certainly possible to work around it, but it's an irritation and diminishes the experience to not have things integrate as smoothly as they should (and indeed as they did).
That said they've been evolving it rapidly, dropped the price, and it's really Just Worked. For all fixed locations I really wish there was fiber too, but until that happy day arrives sometime in the distant future I'm really grateful for what Starlink has enabled for rural internet.
Selling $3k equipment for $500 is the path to a death spiral. Especially when shipping equipment to a warzone where the equipment life is around 3 months and several of the users don't appreciate the losses.
Starlink is doing value engineering so there's a company tomorrow.
They hope to be the first constellation to recover lifetime costs and profit. Avoiding bankruptcy
Uh, the business terminal is $2500, not $500 (and the standard terminal is $600 too). I don't live in a warzone, I live in northern New England. The "$3k for $500" thing is from the beta period over 3 years ago, costs on even the basic one have long since dropped a lot. Not including a router at all would also save a big pile of hardware. And it's not presence of SFP or separate ethernet or not that has anything to do with most of the BOM either.
Literally nothing you wrote had anything to do with my comment, just generic LLM type shlock. Try to do better.
LLM what? I'm on pretty much every starlink forum. Those rectangular dishes cost around $1700 to manufacture when they first became available. Maybe $400 to $750 today. You've never heard of loss leaders? Contrarevenue? Cost curves? Yes the first round ones were 3k all in.
There's new board revisions all the time.
Until Q2 2023 SpaceX was losing money on Terminals in the US. The discounts are still there outside the US.
Do you think the cost of manufacturing is now under $250? How much does air shipping to Europe in bulk cost for the dishes?
My observation is that SpaceX is Elon's most successful company. It is fully private, he has great ties with US govt and even if Starlink goes out, SpaceX will keep shinning on.
I build custom setups with laser, fiber optic, SFP+ and QSFP28 switches and openflow routers, outdoor enclosures, airborne and watertight enclosures, low speed and high speed directional and gimballed mobile mountings, battery and solar 24/7 power supplies, drone carriers, etc.
>For all [rural] fixed locations I really wish there was fiber too
Happy to help you out here. Think bundeling many patched firmware Starlinks up to 10 Gbps to jump-start the rural backbone, then extend it for 100km for $10K. 36 years experience.
Our Fiberhood speciality is rural, easier, cheaper, DIY deployable and already in more locations than you think [1]. Guerilla fiber plus instant Starlink.
I don't imagine we'll be getting the upgrade anytime soon (in Mexico, and logistically in general I don't know how an upgrade/swap would be handled).
The jitter/etc fixes look great, but we are off-grid here on limited solar power (we have to unplug the fridge every night or we won't have any battery left in the morning). So a little disappointed to see increased power consumption (glad that we would never need the snowmelt feature here).
A mobile dishy will be released sometime later this year. I imagine this version will prioritise power efficiency and size. This version should have lower power consumption at the cost of network performance.
Interesting, hadn't considered that the mobile equipment would be different. I do think the mobile service monthly charge is higher than the standard/stationary service?
As a new Starlink customer, they didn't do a great job of communicating the REV3 -> REV4 transition. While they primarily displayed the kickstand version (plus alternative mount options) it was vague enough that I was surprised to open the box and not see the tripod everyone else's dish seemed to have come with. To get to the order page, you first put in a delivery address and from there they simply hid mentions to the REV3/articulated option which is still shown for non-U.S. delivery addresses.
In a way, it's great not to have the extra moving parts and complications that come with articulation. Performance-wise, REV4 seems to work fine even when the app complains about misalignment. On anchor, a boat can easily swing +/- 20° within a minute while bobbing around a few degrees, which means any increase in range and power helps considerably.
My only disappointment is the power consumption that is likely inevitable with the wider-range static terminal. The possibility of cutting power draw by 30-50% makes me wonder if I should downgrade to a secondhand REV3.
> The main difference is the PoE circuit. Now, it’s on a separate board. This PCB receives 48 PoE ...
Can anyone suss out from the text, if REV4 would work with what kind of PoE?
I have what must be a REV3 dish, powered by a custom power source due to incompatibility of the "PoE" used by REV3. I'm doing that to avoid using the starlink router/AP piece. This is a standard, well-blogged about solution.
I thought PoE was good for up to (or exactly?) 56V, so I guess the incompatibility in REV3 is more about the wattage delivered, not the voltage.
I would be eager to get a REV4 just for the jitter improvement, which is a big issue for me. If it also can use standard PoE, that's another huge win. Or at least, if it can use the same kind of power supply I'm using for REV3, that's fine as well.
Oh, I see from the writeup now that the power consumption is quite high due to the heater. The main PCB is just pulling out PoE standard power probably because that just makes sense from BOM POV. But the input power to the dish itself needs to support the heater as well.
I am surprised that both this and the previous version state an operating temperature only down to -30C. If it really does stop working at that temperature, that would definitely be a problem for me. It regularly gets colder than that where I live, including just a couple days ago. I would want to know that it worked down to -40C before going this route.
if you have terrestrial internet, why would you want starlink at all?
if you don't have terrestrial internet, i'm doubtful there's another solution that goes so cold. are you currently using such a solution? please share if so.
I have broadband wireless internet run by our provincial telco. The antenna on my roof accesses a tower about 10km away. It works in -40C weather just fine and has for years. Hardware is by Huawei (yeah I know, but my options are limited). I live in a rural area and other forms of internet (ADSL, cable) are out of the question.
I'm looking for alternatives because I am limited to 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up and pay extra per month after 100G of data. There are plans that can at most double those data rates but it starts getting expensive.
My wireless connection 10 km away is across a river. The nearest town to me not crossing a river is nine miles away. That is a little far to run my own fiber.
GP is suggesting that instead of your current pair of antenna (one at your site, one at the ISP), you can hack a pair of starlink dishes. I'm not sure why you'd do that vs off the shelf 60ghz equipment. I guess the 60ghz is not good in bad weather, but at 10Ghz there isn't any problems.
Then the fiber part I didn't understand at all. But I didn't take away he was suggesting you run fiber except maybe from the dish to your MPOE. I could have misunderstood.
Of course this is useless because your ISP isn't going to support it on their end. And GP completely ignored the -40C issue. I think he ignored all context and was only addressing your bandwidth remark.
Lo and behold, the ubiquitu 60Ghz antenna do go down that cold. That might be something your WISP would support, but still weather might be a problem with signal quality.
It feels to me like it would be worth it to not have internet during those extra cold days, if 95+% of the time you have much more bandwidth. Or rig up an external heater -- you only need to get +10C out of it.
I have a similar connection setup to you, but I'm not in cold weather. I run starlink plus my WISP connection. I could reduce it to just starlink if I could get low jitter. Well, not quite. I have to backhaul my cellular signal over the WISP connection. I like how that works vs a booster antenna. I'm not sure if that's going to work well over starlink, jitter or not.
Folks around here don't cheap out buying car batteries, that's for sure. Trickle chargers and battery blankets help as well when things get really cold, as do block heaters that make it easier for the battery to turn the engine over and get it started.
I love the ideas behind what they do, but it'll take a long time before I trust any of those companies again. Back in 2018 I made a reservation for a Powerwall, and after waiting a couple of months and not hearing anything back, I've written a request to have the reservation fee (500EUR) returned to me, once every 6 months or so, without hearing back from a single person ever, even after writing multiple different email addresses.
That they can't agree on the pricing for a dish model doesn't surprise me a bit, they seem so disorganized even in their public marketing.
After 28 months I still can not get my second Starlink dish and account activated. You can't find an address, phone number or email to contact the company. They do offer a chat function to a helpdesk (which is not the Starlink/SpaceX company) but of course these people can't do anything for you, certainly not activate your account!
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the worst. My other account was working for two months but then Starlink changed the payment form GUI and suddenly they no longer accepted my European bank accounts or Apple Pay or iDeal payment systems anymore, only credit card numbers. European people rarely have credit cards and certainly can't suddenly aquire one while roaming. And of course it would only work if you had a working roaming internet... wait a minute....
When I eventually had opened a new bank account with a credit card at great cost and expense, Starlink of course did not accept it. No recourse, no contact, no payments, nada.
Anyone want to buy two revision 3 Starlink dishes, as-is, where-is, never been used? [1].
[1] From an Australian personals ad: "Rain gauge for sale, as-is-where-is, never been used".
A joke told by Bush Tucker Man Les Hiddens while traveling in the Australian outback desert.
I’m confused. Upthread [1] you said you were trying to activate your second Starlink dish but now you claim to have activated more than 100 Starlinks ?
In these comments there is a distinction between between activating the private personal Starlink accounts of user morphle and activating the Starlink accounts of other people by the same person on behalf of a rural internet coöperative in other countries.
We also helped rural Spain, rural Ukraine and on other continents and islands with setting up optical mesh and satellite internet, most of which had Starlink links as backup.
That's for credit cards, debit cards penetration is much higher, my guess from working in a big fintech previously is that around 85-90% of people with a bank account in the EU have at least a debit card.
Sure on paper they are different things and they both involve different parties but in practice both are accepted everywhere. I never had a credit card but I have been using debit cards for decades and only twice an actual credit card was required: for booking a hotel abroad and for renting a car abroad.
I've been online in various ways since 2000s sometime, and have never stumbled upon a website/service/shop that doesn't accept my debit cards (which are Visa and Mastercard).
Are European debit cards maybe somehow different than US ones, and the experience differs between the two?
I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Visa debit card. I have never seen a Visa/Mastercard debit card in my life. My debit card supports SEPA and Giropay. Which... many websites don't. (I remember when Steam got Giropay support one day, that was a pleasant surprise.)
In 99% of the places I can use my credit card I can also use my debit card, online or offline (well, except in Germany with their EC cards and stuff) that's the relevance of my point...
For many things they do, but I'd never order from an new/semi-reputable company online via SEPA credit transfer, and for analogous reasons a company would never accept SEPA direct debit from unknown customers.
If you have a credit card but don't want to use it for an uncertain online pre-order of a new product, what do you use it for?
> If you have a credit card but don't want to use it for an uncertain online pre-order of a new product, what do you use it for?
I have credit and debit cards. Basically no point in using the credit card, so I only use it for emergencies when nothing else works, which has been exactly once in my life so far, and that was in Mexico. In Spain (home) / around Europe I've never had an issue with my debit card, so it's what I keep using everywhere.
Credit cards are a useful backstop to have if for some reason you don't have access to your main current account / have a large bill to pay and have money in savings.
99% of the time when I use my credit card, it's to rent a car in the USA.
Are you thinking credit cards vs. debit cards, or cards vs. bank transfers? I agree that the former are largely equivalent modulo liquidity concerns, but for the latter, cards and push-based bank account payments (at least in SEPA) have significantly different rights and liabilities.
>just because we have credit cards doesn't mean we use them
I concur, using credit cards is rather dangerous, especially online and in app forms for both buyer and seller alike [6].
>SEPA based payments work out far better
Indeed, but since recently (2018?) European banks couldn't confiscate your money on a whim, like the US credit card companies did for decades. Now European banks do too, just like PayPal [4].
Enshittfication was first coined by Cory Doctorrow [3] here [2] and it applies everywhere now [1].
> I concur, using credit cards is rather dangerous
Your link is about chargeback. I'm pretty much exclusively using credit cards for daily payment and I can't even remember the last time I got any problems. I never pay interest either.
I get that you don't like or trust credit card, and it isn't popular in Europe, but don't be generalizing. Even in Europe my credit cards work well, except for the unpopularity of Amex.
I do not get why people insist on defending the credit card companies and their ungoing enshittification and changing rules and laws[1]. I would prefer you refuting my central argument[2].
Credit card laws and rules have many more problems than just chargebacks. For two decades online payment webpages stole credit card numbers and stole money from people. I could list many more documented cases.
Elsewhere someone argues that debit cards are not credit cards. I agree.
Of course Starlink forms reject debit cards too.
> For two decades online payment webpages stole credit card numbers and stole money from people. I could list many more documented cases.
In this case, it's better than debit cards as you are not out of money until the bank reverts the fraudulent charge.
Now with 3DS this is way better, but I am way wearier of using my debit card number online (so I generate temporary cards) compared to credit - if they steal the card number, there is no problem.
>Have you ever paid for satellite Internet before?
Yes, as the first public internet provider in North Europe (1988) I paid for almost all satellite Internet services before and usually was one of the earliest adopters. For example [1].
In 1997 I met with Ian Alexander and proposed him to deploy his first 400 meter long rigid airships at 10km-20km height to become the first very low-orbit internet provider. He subsequently got an experimental flying permit in my country through my political parliamentary contacts.
It turned out to cost $40K per month to crew the rigid airships 24/7, just barely profitable for a 500km circle of reception.
>Paying less than $1 per GB is something that happened because of starlink.
The actual cost of 1 GB transit traffic in 2024 is $0,00006944 (I am sorry, I may be off by a factor of 1024, than it could be $0,0711, My apologies, as soon as I have this confirmed I won't be able to edit this HN comment anymore).
Starlink buys internet transit traffic locally where your receiver is, then bounces it off their satellite back to you. So they pay very little compared to what they charge you. And I have never ever been able to download 1 GB for $1, they throttle you long before you reach 75 GB per month.
And when your area is oversubscribed they just throttle your traffic, no need to raise the price.
You’re forgetting the part where they launch and operate thousands of satellites and many earth stations, as well as manufacture the user terminals. Oh and they have to write the software that makes the whole thing work.
"In May 2018, SpaceX estimated the total cost of designing, building and deploying the constellation would be at least US$10 billion. Revenues from Starlink in 2022 were reportedly $1.4 billion accompanied by a net loss, with a small profit being reported starting in 2023." [1].
Other estimates and other credible sources point out that SpaceX made adequate profits if you count the military and government subsidies[1].
Not only the Chinese government is deploying their own satellite internet, several other are too. Probably because its profitable.
Are you making an argument against supply and demand here? I’m trying to figure out what basic principles of economics I need to explain before I further engage.
I sincerely doubt economic principles where ever a concern [1].
I remember many rumours of Elon Musk in Moscow at the founding of SpaceX with former Pentagon people? Lots of other reports on military considerations of SpaceX. Hard to verify [2][3].
You're mixing up stories. Elon was in Moscow prior to founding SpaceX as he was attempting to purchase an ICBM to refurbish into a rocket to send a terrarium to Mars.
He settled on founding SpaceX on the flight back because after the oligarchs lead him around a bunch with no intention of actually negotiating a sale, they straight up spat at him.
I'm talking about $1 per GB for satellite internet. In 2019. Or even today in 2024
I'd like to pay that kinda money for transit in sub Saharan Africa.
We don't all live in Ashburn and Frankfurt.
Some people are connected only via Intelsat and OneWeb
As for starlink throttling. There's people doing multiple TB per month every month. Go try that on your residential Viasat, HughesNet or Eutelsat plan
Transit is only expensive when you're small. What makes you think it's a big part of operational cost? Or something to base the retail price on? You likely spend more on power and staff
In Europe, starlink buys virtual or real l2 transport circuits and carries traffic to Frankfurt. They use lasers to carry traffic too when they don't have ground stations like in Kazakhstan
You can't afford to use Iridium to watch Netflix if you could even get enough bandwidth
Yes they are. So you can imagine how much is lost in Ukraine especially when Ukrainians travel to where it's even more discounted to buy in bulk. Use the dishes for 3 months to a year at $50 and proudly talk about how they paid in full.
Anyway the manufacturing costs are down from $3k to $750 ish. So things are looking up
Absurdity of complaining about discounts aside (wish I had enough money to complain about discounts!), geographically keyed discounts make sense because each Starlink satellite serves a relatively small patch of Earth at any instance. This means Starlink can simultaneously be oversubscribed in one country and under-subscribed in another. Discounts are a common sense tool to address regional under-subscription.
Previous to Starlink I was paying the same amount to a small regional telco for less than 10% of the performance. So to me it feels like a bargain rather than overcharging.
same here when I first got Starlink - I was paying more for a 3MB DSL line from Verizon, and for less money I got roughly 100X the speed from Starlink - I would have paid 10X as much for this if I needed to - a real game changer for folks that aren't served by better options (i.e. FTTH)
You’re not entitled to use Elon’s satellites. And in reality, the service is aggressively priced. It seems they only started breaking even a few months ago.
Also, costs are not geographically uniform. They need regulatory permission to operate in a country, and some countries make that easier than others. Sometimes market access means paying lots of tax too.
This is only correct in lawless land, such as right in the middle of Africa.
In most nations, in even some totalitarian dictatorships(dictatorships hate those opinionated and powerful), you are only allowed to deny services by conditions and to extents tolerated by law.
Some developed countries are moving towards Internet and smartphones as human rights, and handing out phones to homeless people. That implies it's rather phone network operators that don't have the entitlement to speak of such entitlements.
The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.
Yea, it can take your life, your children, your freedom, and your dignity right along with the wealth. You harbor a view of "positive rights", that you are entitled to property that belongs to someone else; positive rights stand in direct conflict with negative rights, things that you are free from, like censorship, or search and seizure. Negative rights create economic cooperation and create robust societies with diverse opportunities, positive rights create bread lines and mass murder.
>The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.
It cant take anything from an individual that they aren't willing to give up. They can make things very hard for them if they decide not to.
Huh? Starlink is in the US and his right to operate physical satellites is under US jurisdiction. So even acknowledging this middle-school observation of yours that governments can in fact confiscate property, the only leverage foreign governments have over Starlink is the right to deny him permission to transmit into their territory. (Even then, only because the US mostly respects international agreements on this. The US lets Elon transmit into some countries like Iran without their permission and there’s not much they can do about it).
