SpaceX Rolls Out Premium Starlink Satellite Internet Tier at $500 Per Month (cnbc.com) 116
SpaceX has rolled out a new, more powerful premium tier of its Starlink satellite internet service that's targeted at businesses and enterprise customers. From a report: The new product, which was added to the company's website Tuesday night, comes at five times the cost of the consumer-focused standard service: Starlink Premium requires a $500 fully refundable deposit, a $2,500 fee for the antenna and router, and service is $500 per month. The standard Starlink service, which launched in October 2020, has a $99 fully refundable deposit, a $499 hardware fee, and service is $99 per month. But Elon Musk's company touts improved hardware, faster service speeds and priority support for its premium customers. "Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses," the SpaceX website said. According to the Starlink website, the first premium deliveries will begin in the second quarter.
Good deal (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Good deal (Score:3)
FYVM (Score:2)
Meanwhile, my projected install date went from "mid-to-late 2021" to Possibly mid-2022, and if it slips again I will cancel and get my refund
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Given the current gen don't have the capabilities to communicate satellite to satellite, they need to have a starlink ground station within range for it to work, so for some remote areas that could be the case
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More than Double the Capability (Score:3)
For 5x the price.
Am I missing something here? Why not just contract 2 standard links?
Re:More than Double the Capability (Score:4, Informative)
I expect (and I am purely guessing here) that the business account can handle a near maxed out bandwidth, much better than the standard dishes. Which often tend to take a burst of high speed, then settle down to a bit of a lower speed. And/Or it may have a much higher Upload rate than home internet does.
My home internet is 400mbs download and 20mbs upload. Which is still overkill for me, even with the upload. However at work my Download and Upload are close to 10gbs (during non-peak times) However my work internet is designed to handle 30k of people using it, They are paying more for a 10mbs circuit that is normally off unless the primary has an outage, than I would pay for 20+ home accounts.
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I think it's more likely just channel bonding and allocation of more slots in the time domain. Maybe they get priority when allocating slots too.
I don't think Starlink have said anything about usage limits on the lower cost tier, but these days with game downloads clocking in a 100 gigabytes or more bandwidth caps are hopefully not on the cards.
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For 5x the price. Am I missing something here? Why not just contract 2 standard links?
Seems unlikely they are going to allow that, if it means you don't pay them the 5x premium.
Re:More than Double the Capability (Score:5, Informative)
Re: More than Double the Capability (Score:2)
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Re:More than Double the Capability (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in Canada here and we've had Starlink up and running for over six months. My neighbor got his just before Christmas after waiting only a month. Perhaps its dish and component availability that are holding things up now.
We're thinking of getting some kind of plastic bubble to cover our dish (whatever material is transparent to the frequencies in use). When the wind blows the dish moves a lot and that causes connection issues. They say it's engineered for hurricane-force winds, but I have my doubts. I also am not sure it would survive a hail storm.
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Right. Plus there are issues of keeping the snow off the dome, and also heat in the summer. The dish has heaters built into it to keep snow off. That wouldn't be of any use if the dish were covered. We plan to put the dish on top of a 26' tall building, so it won't be easy to access it. I'm not sure the best way to go. Since it points virtually straight up, perhaps just a bit of a wind guard on the west and north would be enough. Those are the directions our hurricane winds come from.
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"For 5x the price.
Am I missing something here? Why not just contract 2 standard links?"
You'd need a big camper.
Well, he has to pay for all this somehow (Score:5, Insightful)
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and mines, and oil rigs, monitoring stations in the middle of nowhere.
also of course, cargo ships.
all of these rely on Inmarsat or Iridium nowadays, which provide tiny bandwith for a LOT of money.
in south america, internet is usually only available in densely populated areas like city centers. the outskirts are usually only covered with long-range wifi at 2-4mbps. 4G data is capped so unusable for people who want to stream. i suppose once the "one-size-fits-all $100" price is adjusted to a more realistic p
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"and mines, and oil rigs, monitoring stations in the middle of nowhere"
Idaho?
Re:Well, he has to pay for all this somehow (Score:4, Insightful)
Starlink probably has a lifetime of 10 years before the satellites have to be replaced.
Using Falcon 9 as the launch vehicle, with Elon's claimed marginal launch cost of about $15M to put 50 birds up, and assuming a per-satellite cost of $30k (a number I pulled out of my butt, but it seems reasonable -- yes, most satellites cost many millions each, but that's because they don't benefit from economies of scale, but Starlink will be making 250 of them per month), it will cost ~$1B per year to maintain the constellation.
With that constellation maintenance cost, Starlink should roughly break with 1M subscribers. That seems like a very viable business model to me.
Assuming Starship succeeds, and delivers something close to its promise, though, Starlink looks incredibly profitable. If we assume a marginal launch cost of about $2M to put 400 birds up and the same assumed per-satellite cost, it will cost ~$100M per year to maintain the constellation. They'd only need 100k subscribers to break even. There are individual US states whose rural population would give them that.
Note that if my numbers seem low, it's because I'm looking at long-term steady-state numbers, in which all of the processes are refined and optimized. You can substitute my numbers with larger ones, though, and I don't think it changes the viability very much, because I think that it will be easy for Starlink to get several million subscribers. Iridium has 1.2M subscribers, for a vastly inferior and more expensive service.
I don't expect farmers to get starlink, I expect their city-slicker cousins to visit and bring it with them.
I live in rural America and I'll tell you that farmers are chomping at the bit, really anxious to get Starlink as soon as its available, especially on vehicles and farm equipment, and especially in areas that don't have good cellular coverage. What makes you think that city slickers who have no need of Starlink would be the ones to inform their rural cousins about it?
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That's a lot of math based on numbers pulled out of your (and in some cases, Musk's) ass. Just look at how often the words "will" and "assuming" show up in your post.
Not a single launch done thus far has cost anywhere near $15 million. There's no data on how long these satellites last either, especially relevant considering they're going to be put together as cheaply as possible.
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That's a lot of math based on numbers pulled out of your (and in some cases, Musk's) ass.
So provide some alternative numbers. There's actually quite a lot of room for profitability here, even assuming just a few million subscribers.
Re: Well, he has to pay for all this somehow (Score:2)
"The most commercial uptake will be cruise and cargo ships, little else. Residential uptake will be farms and remote islands."
You forgot planes commercially. As for residential though, you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. There are TONS of residences in America alone that can't get any high speed wired internet access at all. GEO satellite is overpriced garbage and yet for many it has long been the best option available, and Starlink is going to murder that shit.
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And don't forget about cell companies expanding service to rural areas. That's where the big money is.
Tesla strategy take 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
A lesser CEO would just pocket the cash. At least Musk is plowing the $$$ back into something interesting.
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Starlink has to be limited to a relatively small number of users, because it just doesn't have the bandwidth to offer decent broadband to everyone. These higher performance connections will be essentially taking up multiple slots, and presumably will only be offered in areas where take up is low so as not to limit the number of normal subscribers too much. Things like cruise ships and aircraft that spend most of their time over the ocean.
Musk is currently the richest man in the world, with a personal net wo
Re:Tesla strategy take 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Musk is currently the richest man in the world, with a personal net worth estimated at $259 billion. He's pocketing plenty.
I mean to be fair that's mostly due to stock prices. The cash is not in his "pocket" (although he has plenty there as well). Point is he's not paying off investors and providing gigantic bonuses to execs, he's investing the revenue back into the business. He wouldn't be able to tap into the stock market wealth unless he issued/sold shares which deflates the stock price.
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"He's pocketing plenty."
He doesn't actually need money (above a modicum necessary for sustenance).
He's spending a huge amount of money on his toys though - Cybertruck, Giga Presses, battery factories, first to orbit (that is not a country).
As billionaires go, he's spending incredibly little for himself and incredibly much on his toys. Fortunately, we all benefit from his toys.
I don't think Volkswagen or Mercedes would have good electric cars if not for Tesla.
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I really hope it's better than Tesla Strategy Take 1, because we still don't have and affordable EV for the people. The Model 3 still costs twice as much as an affordable non-EV.
I think Musk had a really nice idea with the Tesla Roadster-- make cool sports cars and have rich people overpay for them to subsidize cheap EVs for the less fortunate. But he simply didn't do that. Then came the MANY promises of fully autonomous vehicles year after year... but that keeps getting pushed back. Then the solar roof til
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I think it's time to come to terms. Musk mastered the meme aspects of investment, environmentalism, and "outsider businessperson" so that he doesn't have to actually deliver on his promises.
He makes enough money and delivers enough of his promises that he doesn't have to actually *fully* deliver on his promises.
I see a ton of model 3s on the road. It's not 20k but it's a pretty good bargain for a lot of people.
No one has fully autonomous vehicles except maybe Waymo and those aren't going to be cheap enough for most people to buy. They're targeting a taxi service.
He's easily winning the billionaire space race with Starlink and re-usable rockets. If Starship does half of what he claims
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Yeah, I doubt anyone can score a 100% win on everything they touch.
The fact that he is currently involved closely with 2 of the hottest companies(not to mention his involvment with another successful company previously, Paypal) in the world currently shows that when he scores, he can score big. He can afford to win only 2 out of 10 and still be doing extremely well. Especially when his wins are all things that can change the world in a huge way.
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With that context, his smaller money-losing companies make a lot more sense. Once he gets a few large human-rated ships capable of mars-travel, he's going to need solar panels for energy, batteries to store said energy, underground diggers because at least some infrastructure will be under the surface, robots to help out with labor, etc. etc. He
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I think you're on the money about his random startups being vertical integration for a mars colony, but I think you underestimate the importance of the boring company. It's not just "some infrastruct
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Exactly what Space affords (Score:3, Insightful)
Starlink supposed to provide superior coverage and enable the impossible even if the technology isn’t OTS, cheap or for the lowest common denominator class.
Kudos to SpaceX technology congratulations to Elon Musk for his leadership-style aimed at performance over monopoly. Starlink is flattening the field of communication, democratizing access and competing against entrenched providers on their terms.
Re:Exactly what Space affords (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly I don't think it will do all that much for competition. Due to the limited number of users possible in a geographical area, it won't compete with wired and wireless (5G) broadband. It's also an order of magnitude slower than fibre services.
It's still a massive win for people in more remote areas, and eventually for on-ship and in-flight broadband. It's only now possible because SpaceX is driving down the cost of launching the satellites.
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wired data is often only available where there is a dense population. and 4G/5G have data caps that make it unrealistic for streaming or "modern family internet usage".
i know because I live in south america, and I used to support wireless ISPs that sold their service wherever the big telcos/cable cos refused to operate. there are millions of people living in those areas. they won't be able to afford $100/mo but once the service offers lower tiers, people will sign up.
also 5G has the same limitations of user
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If there are a lot of people in an area then they won't all be able to get Starlink. With 5G the number of users can be increased by installing more access points. If one is overloaded, turn the power down and install another one just far enough away to avoid overlap. Of course ISPs may choose not to do that and instead just give everyone degraded service... In any case, it's less of an issue than with Starlink.
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oh yes, how did 5G companies not think of this! they should hire you!!!!
or maybe there is a reason why they don't and won't.
starlink will be happy to serve those areas.
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they won't be able to afford $100/mo but once the service offers lower tiers, people will sign up.
I doubt that'll happen... What will happen is those rural areas will get a Starlink sh and then share the cost/connection between multiple households.
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i might be slightly out of date here, but what ISP's in the US currently offer service for less than $99 a month?
and fwiw, rural people have been paying out all available orifices (and in some cases, new ones were added) for internet service that is several orders of magnitude worse than starlink.
and as stated, cellular service is 'okay', but just slightly cheaper than traditional sat service (at least here in the US); but the caps are just silly. Also topography puts a kink in things, as people who live i
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i might be slightly out of date here, but what ISP's in the US currently offer service for less than $99 a month?
and fwiw, rural people have been paying out all available orifices (and in some cases, new ones were added) for internet service that is several orders of magnitude worse than starlink.
Well, I live in a mostly rural area in eastern Tennessee and my 500mbit/500mbit fiber costs $50 a month [trilight.net]. That's at home, though. They charge more like $250 a month for the 500/500 service for business accounts (static IPs and a few other services). Of course, my ISP is an electrical coop owned by the rate payers rather than a traditional ISP or utility, but we went from zero to "10GBe available in more than half the county" in two years.
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wow, that's a pretty swanky deal; I would totally go for that if it was an option.
But my options (Rural oregon) were:
viasat: $160+ a month and a 100GB cap (600ish MS latency and ~10MB/s throughput, at best)
tmobile/sprint: ~$120 a month and also with a 100GB cap. (20-30ms latency, 7-16MB/s throughput, at best)
a fiber optic line is being run out past our lane sometime in 2024, but getting it the 1/4 mile up to the house would have been thousands upon thousands of dollars for trenching/permits/etc.
Starlink by
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i might be slightly out of date here, but what ISP's in the US currently offer service for less than $99 a month?
I'm paying Verizon $40/month for FIOS. It took some time to keep declining their more expensive options, but they eventually admitted to the existence of an Internet only service. I am not paying them for TV, landline phone or mobile phone. I think they did offer services that included some/all of that for somewhere in the $100/month range.
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It will work for its target market just fine - which is everyone that doesn't live in the metro or suburbia which are dense enough to get a good wired connection.
I have a 30mbps down/3mbps up rural DSL connection right now, which is pretty meh... My Starlink dish arrives the end of this month - and will get me out of rural DSL Hell
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I just got my kit yesterday, and we've got knee-deep snow everywhere, so I probably won't get it installed until the weekend.
I'm going to be testing it at home because I am very eager to deploy it at work for a number of remote locations. Not super-rural - buildings in or adjacent to small towns.
I'm fine with fiber being an order of magnitude faster - I'd actually be OK with 2. And competing with 5G or local cable will be easy - just don't make me want to stab anyone more than once a month.
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Public IP? (Score:3)
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I somehow doubt that the customer service people even know what ipv6 is, most isp's give vague answers and isp webssites usually look like powerpoint presentations.
Starlink was nating ipv4 for 'consumers'.
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Re:Public IP? (Score:4, Informative)
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I'd only pretty much seen static IP addresses with business accounts...at least in the US.
I got one for my home office.
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Public address != static address
A dynamic public address is sufficient for most home users, in conjunction with a dynamic DNS service to make that connection accessible.
There are at least two good dDNS providers... and there may be many more, but I stopped looking.
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yes, you don't get public IPs anymore with most residential internet services. Some ISPs allow you to request one, some charge a couple bucks every month for one, but the reality is that IPv4 had less than 4 billion IPs and the world has over 6 billion people.
we've run out of IPv4 many years ago.
the reality is that 99.9% of people don't need incoming connections so giving them one is a waste of addresses. i'm ok with this except for the fact that most ISPs won't even give you one on request. I've encountere
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In my experience, Comcast gives you one public IP address. It's my own wi-fi base station that's doing the NATting.
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yeah as long as they have public addresses they will keep handing them out.
once they run out they will start CGNATing, if they aren't already. this is nothing new. ISPs have already paid for those IPs (many are hoarding them).
i've seen at least one ISP giving you either CGNAT (100.64/10) or public IPs, depending on how early you get to the DHCP.
I've seen another ISP that is only now offering Public IPs as a premium
I'm currently in one that always assigns public IPs.
But anything can change at any moment real
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Yup, there are definitely no guarantees. I've been fortunate that my public IPv4 address hasn't changed in several years, since I do occasionally find it convenient to connect in from the outside (usually for checking something work-related from a remote standpoint). I suspect it's because I don't live in a crowded area - if I were in a big housing development with overloaded cable infrastructure, who knows what the situation would be.
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I configured PPTP dial-in access to a server in DigitalOcean. It acts as a router. My home router is connected to it and in case I can't reach it i can dial in to the server and route my traffic there.
I know PPTP is frowned upon nowadays, but I just couldn't make L2TP/IPSec work and PPTP works fine from android. OpenVPN would require yet another app to be installed.
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Based on other comments in this thread, I think you mean "static IP". Come on, people. This is Slashdot!
You always get a "public" IP when you're on the Internet. Usually this is referred to as a "routable IP" because packets with your IP in the header will route over the public Internet as opposed to a non-routable IP where the packets will only traverse your LAN.
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Mod parent up. You can always tell a dynamic DNS service what your current home IP is to get a DNS that always points there. Some of these services are free.
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For $CDN45/month (Score:2)
I get 100MB/s up and down. For a bit more (not double) I can get a static IP and use it for business. For a small business or anything that is just displaying that they are a business (e.g. brick and mortar), that is tons. And if you're bigger than a small business or doing a bunch of online sales I'd bet Starlink wouldn't cut it unless they prove otherwise. Which given it is via radio signal at least 100 miles up and then down, I doubt they will.
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At 550 km up, a Starlink satellite takes 1.835ms to communicate. Double that to hit a ground station, and you have 3.670ms delay from going up to space and back down. Other than that, it's the regular routing delays you get with any ISP.
As to price and bandwidth, the bandwidth should go up as they add more satellites. I don't know what their plan is, but I expect 100Mb/s up/down is certainly doable. (Did you mean Mb/s or MB/s? Normally speeds are in Mb/s. Big difference.)
As to price, they're currently
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Signals in a fibre optic channel are not subject to the same interference as a radio signal through atmosphere, especially when the radio signal has to contend with magnetic storms periodically. So nice try. You can't compare apples and oranges, or didn't you get the memo?
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You certainly can compare apples and oranges. If your concern is getting enough servings of fruit in your diet, they both count as one. They have lots of differences, but they both check off the same box.
Yes, fibre optic connections will almost always be better than Starlink, but not everyone has that option. Many people are stuck with DSL or worse, and Starlink is much better. Starlink also has the potential to provide service in situations where local ISPs fail, but I've yet to hear exactly what weath
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You're the one confusing apples and oranges. Noise and interference do not affect transit time.
Furthermore, interference can be addressed with ECC---there are a variety of digital and analog encoding methods. These methods are usually required in both wired and wireless media, so it's not a one-sided penalty.
On the other hand, light travels significantly more slowly through a fiber optic cable than through the atmosphere. So, in theory, broadcast/satellite links could have lower latency if they don't add to
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Luddite much?
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No one serves their own website from on-premises internet connection anymore. If you think that's a big market, you're a delusional nerd.
And even LARGE companies don't even run their own mail servers anymore. $45 is peanuts compared to what you have to pay to the on-site engineer. So most sane people just use a hosting service, or "cloud" as they call them nowadays.
And besides, starlink is obviously not targeting people living in areas where $45/mo service is available. But you know, it's a big world, and L
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Yeah, and my bandwidth would still work if it just took in one or two dozen people working from a desk. So your complaint still doesn't work. In areas where people don't get good internet, they almost certainly can't afford $6K a year American. So your complaint STILL doesn't work.
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ah yes, third world shitholes with no water or electricity. it seems for americans it's either fully developed, or dirt poor. there is no middle ground.
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This was to be expected (Score:2)
Once the system began to load up and reports of slow downs started rolling in
create a buzz... evaluate demand... ramp up prices
Same thing traditional ISPs did
I'm no fan of Elon Musk... (Score:1, Troll)
...and have long said he belongs in jail for fraud but Starlink is the real deal. We were given several of their beta-version units a couple days after Hurricane Ida and they were the only connectivity of any kind that we had for about a week. They were the most reliable connectivity we had for probably six weeks after. Not even the first-responder cellular network stayed up for any dependable lengths of time. It's not a stretch to say those things saved lives.
That said I've seen the final version and al
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Sadly they went in the opposite direction and removed ethernet connectivity from the router entirely (you have to buy a special $20 dongle to get that back)
but all things considered, that's a pretty minor gripe.
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I wonder if this new business/enterprise-class tier is different hardware though. Hopefully it's not another Full Self-Driving soon thing.
Re:I'm no fan of Elon Musk... (Score:4, Interesting)
If this new service provides a real WAN address instead of being double-natted.
And right there is why Starlink isn't installed here. If it doesn't provide an option for a real, publicly-routable static IP address at a reasonable price, I don't consider it a replacement for a terrestrial ISP. Last I looked (which I admit has been perhaps a year at this point), such an address wasn't available with Starlink at any price, reasonable or otherwise.
I realise that probably more than 99% of people don't care about that capability, so I fully expect Starlink to be a great success. But unless something changes, I won't be a customer.
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Fun Ida story: between the internet thinking I was in Dallas when connected to Starlink, Oklahoma, Iowa or Idaho depending on whichever hotspot, Nat'lGaurd link or whatever intermittent service was randomly up I managed to get every bank card and account I have frozen for suspicion of fraud over the span of 6 hours. Try begging your bank that yes that was actually you and to unfreeze everything without reissuing new cards because all the Post Offices within 30 miles are destroyed with mail service suspend
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And right there is why Starlink isn't installed here. If it doesn't provide an option for a real, publicly-routable static IP address at a reasonable price, I don't consider it a replacement for a terrestrial ISP. Last I looked (which I admit has been perhaps a year at this point), such an address wasn't available with Starlink at any price, reasonable or otherwise.
A VPN with routable IPv4 address does not cost much compared to the Starlink monthly fee, but of course would lower performance further.
Priority support = we'll remove the cats for you (Score:4, Funny)
Priority support means "we'll come over take the cats off the dish for you."
Standard support means the CSR will ask you to "take a look at your dish - are there cats on it?" then tell you "Please remove them."
Been using Starlink (Score:4, Informative)
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"Streaming" as in watching a video on youtube/netflix which is delivered via TCP, or actual streaming as in viewing a UDP streamed video where any jitter/packet drops will actually cause errors?
It makes sense that there may be interruptions in UDP streams as I suspect their sparse constellation means there may not be multiple satellites in view of the antenna without "re-steering". I assume this will get better once they fill out more or you get a dual-array antenna that can track satellites as they come in
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Bring on the RV plans, PLEASE! (Score:3)
RV internet service is crappy and way overpriced. Starlink offers what would be a very competitive alternative, but today expects a stationary terrestrial address.
It'd go SO well with remote work - one of the last blockers to ultimate mobility is solid internet connects. My phone's hotspot just won't do it, particularly out in the boonies.
utter trash (Score:2)
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I did my reservation in September 2021. It was $125 (CDN). About a week ago, I got an email that my "kit was ready" and paid for the kit ($600). It hasn't shipped yet, but I expect it will this week.
It really depends on your geographic region. At this point, I don't think it is a scam. If I haven't got my kit in a couple of weeks, I'll change my mind.
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Super neighborhood NAT (Score:2)
I can imagine some neighborhoods that just need some basic connectivity that pool their money together and use this as like a neighborhood internet. That monthly cost of $500 spread across you and your neighbor can really pay for itself overtime. The upfront cost of setting up some of the infrastructure but if you can setup a decent neighborhood mesh network and get everyone connected, this really can fix a lot of the last mile issues for a lot of the rural communities that big telcos have left behind.
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I can imagine some neighborhoods that just need some basic connectivity that pool their money together and use this as like a neighborhood internet. That monthly cost of $500 spread across you and your neighbor can really pay for itself overtime. The upfront cost of setting up some of the infrastructure but if you can setup a decent neighborhood mesh network and get everyone connected, this really can fix a lot of the last mile issues for a lot of the rural communities that big telcos have left behind.
And since the alternative is separate consumer level Starlink systems which use CGNAT, nothing is lost by sharing a business connection over NAT.
Before anybody complains... (Score:2)
This is not for you (or me)...
This is for offices, research stations, and hopefully one day cruise ships and airplanes. If I were in a remote farm,
I would really love the basic service, and $100 would be a steal. And now they can amortize my costs by the expensive clients, which is even better. But I would not opt for a $500 internet if I were not crazy.
Another deposit (Score:2)
In Capitalist Mars ... (Score:2)
Starlink Premium requires a $500 fully refundable deposit, a $2,500 fee for the antenna and router, and service is $500 per month.
OK, now you know what an internet connection will cost on Mars.
Re: Starlink is likely causing Covid symptoms (Score:3)
I think lack of pornographic magazines is the real culprit here.
Porn magazines have largely disappeared, and COVID rages worldwide!
Q.E.D.