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Communications The Almighty Buck The Internet

SpaceX Starlink Public Beta Begins: It's $99 a Month Plus $500 Up Front (arstechnica.com) 236

Rei writes: According to an email sent out to the Starlink mailing list, Starlink is now moving from a private, free, invite-only beta to a much larger, subscription-based public beta. Bandwidth estimates have risen to 50-150Mbps, while latency remains similar, at 20-40ms. This is expected to decrease to 16-19ms by summer of 2021. As it is a beta, the email cautions that "There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all" as they enhance the system. Pricing involves an antenna purchase ($500) and a $99/mo subscription rate. There is no data cap. The beta currently only appears to be for the northern U.S. and Canada, but SpaceX expects to quickly move further south; "near global coverage" is targeted at summer of 2021.
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SpaceX Starlink Public Beta Begins: It's $99 a Month Plus $500 Up Front

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  • They want to pay me $99 per month plus a $500 upfront fee to beta test their internet service?? Where do I sign up?
  • I thought they said it was going to be cheap internet access. It is expensive for what you will be getting. One thing for sure, not for gaming. Streaming could have a lot of buffering.

    • Cheap for its intended market yes. Starlink has never been promoted as a service aimed at those with good internet already. Starlink is for rural users who can only get dial up, crappy DSL, Cell based, or Geosync satellite. There are tens of millions of potential customers in North America alone. Plus stuff like cruise ships, cargo vessels, planes. Those users pay several times this cost for vastly slower service right now. Not sure why you think you can't game on it though, 40ms is just fine for gaming.
  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @03:30AM (#60657224)

    Still a way, way better deal than Comcast.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Beware "no cap" though, some ISPs offer it but then throttle your connection when they notice you are trying to use what you paid for. Best to see how it works in practice before shelling out $500 for a modem you can't use with any other ISP.

  • Who do they think they are? Microsoft?
    • Bean counters cooked up a model of target subscribers. Whether it is feasible time will tell. Costs may come down as it scales up. They r getting better but can cash catchup in time?
  • Oh, the whining... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pravetz-82 ( 1259458 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @04:32AM (#60657342)
    This is not a "home Internet" for the average city dweller.
    This is for those in Alaska, the Canadian wilderness, Colombian jungle (you know who), the Australian outback, pretty much whole of Africa, the South pole, all the ships and boats in all the seas, all small Islands that are far from an optical cable, all the planes (maybe), and likely many others as well.
    Cable connection (fiber, ethernet) will always be technically superior and more cost effective in densely populated areas, but these cover something like 3% of earth's surface. [livescience.com] and not all of them have high speed Internet available.
    • There are even great swaths of the lower 48 states in the USA that are without high speed internet. Places out west where homes are literally miles and miles away from each other.

      Or even a friend looking recently at property in upstate New York. The cable company wanted $5000 to lay a line to where he was looking to build a home.

      • I was looking at a house recently that is in an area where AT&T at one point thought was worth running DSL through (buried cable marked along the street), but since they stopped offering it the only option was Hughes. And this place was just off a major road and minutes from a city. One of those lovely cases where AT&T and Comcast both claimed to provide broadband to 70-80+% of the zip code, but not where I was looking.

        We didn't put in an offer because I wouldn't be able to do my job over what I

    • Don't forget a bunch of other clients who would be happy to pay extra for prioritized bandwidth and latency, like stock exchanges, the military (any military), the owners of large yachts.

      I just checked the pricing for Iridium, and $99 buys you 90 minutes voice or the data equivalent. Which, sure, if you're climbing a mountain on your own you can't replace due to the size of the device, but in a lot of other cases it becomes obsolete, as do other companies that have launched on SpaceX rockets, like SES.

  • Too expensive
  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @09:20AM (#60657976)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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