Accepting free dish blocks $90 monthly price available in excess-capacity areas.
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Starlink: Here’s a free satellite dish—if you pay $120 a month instead of $90
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More like Starlink will sell you the dish and router on a perpetual installment plan, then.
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We use it a-la-carte with the RV, a couple times a year.
Current events being what they are, however, we're going to use it as sparingly as possible. (Having solid internet in Mesa Verde last year was really compelling....altering our travel this year where 5G is mostly available was a conscious plan.)
Current events being what they are, however, we're going to use it as sparingly as possible. (Having solid internet in Mesa Verde last year was really compelling....altering our travel this year where 5G is mostly available was a conscious plan.)
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I was thinking of picking one up without a contract to have in case of emergency, but politics being what they are, I can’t support Elon’s ventures right now.
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Oh, so it's free like Amazon Prime shipping, free like an 11th coffee when you buy 10 beforehand, free like a streaming service with ad breaks every 3-6 minutes. Got it.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Taken a page out of MaBell's old rent the phone, keep paying Spanish American War tax...
Not supporting Musk. Kick him off the board, and then you can take my money.
Not supporting Musk. Kick him off the board, and then you can take my money.
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Sadly this. When you give money to an avowed nazi, you are well...giving money to an actual nazi. Paying for starlink is directly funding nazis.
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I heard someone refer to enshittification and all the other rent-seeking business models current in vogue as the rot economy. I kinda like it.
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Bro, no one is earning any sort of appreciable interest on $349 unless you "invest" in a casino or the lottery and get lucky.
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I got this email. I forgot I had signed up wayyy back before the service was available anywhere. I have family that has to use a small, local WISP and thought at the time it might be interesting.
But now, it doesn't matter what the deal is or how good the service is, I'm not giving them any fucking money.
But now, it doesn't matter what the deal is or how good the service is, I'm not giving them any fucking money.
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My understanding of Starlink is that it is quite a good option in more remote areas. At least as compared to the outrageous fees to have a fiber connection installed or trying to make use of (often barely functional) cellular internet. Is that the experience of ARS readers?
$1440 annually is a lot of money if you cannot get a decent internet connection.
$1440 annually is a lot of money if you cannot get a decent internet connection.
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Here in Spain they are doing €40 per month with a 12month contract:
(or pay €175 for the kit and €40p/m with no commitment)
(or pay €175 for the kit and €40p/m with no commitment)
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I got the free dish offer yesterday. Electric company is running fiber but only offering cgnat, I'm likely stuck with my private ip and the phone companies dsl for now. I suspect the phone company is going to fail if the electric companies fiber takes too many customers. Can we switch to IPV6 and get the migration over?
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That's different when I compared this to my parents address in the UK. It's £300 upfront for no commitment or £75 for month 1 of the 12 month fixed term but both are charged at the £75 per month rate, the only difference is the upfront cost.
(That and whether you own the hardware or not, that's not clear from the support page).
Clearly Starlink are doing what they can to take full advantage on a market by market basis.
And for anyone wondering, while I'd prefer not to recommend a product that puts money into a certain persons pocket, my parents are limited by a FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) connection and are 3+ miles from the phone exchange where the fibre cable ends... so at best they get 10Mbps down, 3Mbps up and considering that around 1000 homes are being built where the exchange is, that may well drop. I have a computer there that I can remote into, which at 8pm local they're getting 6.8Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up.
And they're paying £54pm for that. I may have no choice but to suggest that they switch.
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I'm all in favor of a skeptical eye towards financing offers and so on, but I honestly don't really get this article. It's a very long piece on something that looks incredibly minor, nothing like cable or cell phone contracts I've experienced. Clarity on whether it swaps to the regular congestion-based pricing after a year or two would be good, though that should be in the terms somewhere. But the differences described are small potatoes and don't look like anything out of the ordinary. I wouldn't expect the price over 12 months to be identical for any business, because there is some opportunity and risk associated with offering financing. Some people will end up defaulting for one reason or another, there is some hedging required, and if anything that's less then I'd normally expect. It looks like a pretty square deal if the math or requirements make sense for somebody, no "price immediately rises 50-75% at contract end" (cough cough Comcast). I read all this but I guess I just don't really get what content merited a big article on Ars. Pay attention to capex vs opex and terms & conditions? I mean, sure, absolutely, that applies for every single communication contract under the sun. In our experience though Starlink has remained surprisingly reasonable within its specific niche.
I remain very bummed that newer hardware did away with the simple pure terminal capability that the v1 dishes offered. I at least wish there was a business/pro one that could do it, preferably with SFP onboard for data and a separate terminal block or other power capabilities. Although they've been iterating fast so perhaps that is a thing or will be soon. But if you don't have access to something better it's been a real no-bullshit service in my area-limited experience. It may become semi-obsolete in the CONUS at some point for fixed line, in theory there's no reason we shouldn't at least have fiber everywhere we did electric/telephone, though at the true edge there are those who aren't and never have been even on grid. But until/if that happy day arrives it's been great.
Yes, although in the two areas where I have clients with Starlink deployed cellular is not an option either, there is no cellular signal. Nor any WISPs sadly.
One of the clients was previously paying a bit less than $300/month for a 10 mbps connection. Starlink has been an absolute dream and game changer for the last 4 years. We've been working hard to support a community owned coop that is slowly doing fiber in the area, and I'm really happy that sometime in the next year or two good fiber may become available (though Starlink might be worth keeping as a failover). But it still will have offered something nothing else could for that time period, and it's the first internet service I've ever used where they dropped vs increased the price.
I remain very bummed that newer hardware did away with the simple pure terminal capability that the v1 dishes offered. I at least wish there was a business/pro one that could do it, preferably with SFP onboard for data and a separate terminal block or other power capabilities. Although they've been iterating fast so perhaps that is a thing or will be soon. But if you don't have access to something better it's been a real no-bullshit service in my area-limited experience. It may become semi-obsolete in the CONUS at some point for fixed line, in theory there's no reason we shouldn't at least have fiber everywhere we did electric/telephone, though at the true edge there are those who aren't and never have been even on grid. But until/if that happy day arrives it's been great.
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$1440 annually is probably a pretty normal rate for internet in the US. Maybe a bit high, but if you said you paid $120/month for internet, no one here would be shocked.
Satellite internet is for people with no other options. It's not the solution for getting everyone online, it's a solution for getting the few outliers online.
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FWIW I've dealt with that both for Starlink (which didn't initially offer IPv6 or some other useful network QOL stuff like DHCP option 121 they've done since) and cable (even with a business connection Comcast's IP allocations depend on using their modem in full router mode not bridge or your own modem irritatingly). It's genuinely both pretty trivial and reliable to spin up a cheap VPS in a nearby region with an IPv4 and then pipe your whole WAN, or just selected VLANs, through a WireGuard tunnel. Bandwidth is cheap at the center, and a toaster can handle just doing that much no expensive cpu/memory/storage allocations required. Any provider can do it so it's a very competitive market and thus decent pricing. If you really need your own IPv4 public addressable connection despite being behind CGNAT it's easier then ever nowadays.
Of course it absolutely does feel somewhat shitty to have to spend anything extra per month, no matter how little, on such a dumb issue that should have been solved decades ago. But if you can save more money (or get better service) swapping to another ISP vs what you have and IP is the only issue, just keep in mind there are options.
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When I first signed up for HughesNet, I had the option to rent the equipment or pay for the equipment. The equipment price was the same as 2 years of rent, so I bought the equipment and ended up using it for 4 years. Then HughesNet came out with a new plan that required new hardware. Once again, I opted to buy the hardware, and I used it for 3.5 years.
Then, in early 2021, Starlink was finally able to do what tax-payer funded handouts to AT&T could not do: bring low-latency internet service to my neighborhood. I bought the hardware, and have been using it for the past 4 years.
Then, in early 2021, Starlink was finally able to do what tax-payer funded handouts to AT&T could not do: bring low-latency internet service to my neighborhood. I bought the hardware, and have been using it for the past 4 years.
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Or for those on the go of course. I don't do the whole camper or boating thing myself, but I can see how it'd be a neat lifestyle for those into it and a really high quality internet solution that'd work worldwide could be a valuable addition. They'll always have that market.
Though worth always remembering that "the few outliers" constitutes a market of tens of millions in the US alone. And it shouldn't be that way, the American people have gotten screwed there, but hardly any shortage of ink spilled on that front to little avail.
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I don't see why there would be an expectation this would be any different than the current unlimited mobile phone plans from the likes of AT&T, Verizon, T-mobile which come with "free" phones.
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until recently, my entire county was 'At Capacity' for Starlink, and no one could sign up for service. That is not a "few outliers". Aside from the few urban areas with cable or fiber, the primary wireline service is AT&T DSL at 6Mbps; and becuase ATT refuses to invest in their own network without first receiving public funding, once the new capacity is consumed, my county will once again be At Capacity.
I agree, Starlink is not the solution for everyone, but it is an excellent solution for bringing internet service to areas where other providers (even when paid by the FCC) refuse to offer service.
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I'm not talking about all the people who should have another option. We all know the US is underserved by the ISPs.
I don't think satellite is the right solution.for everyone that doesn't have a good terrestrial (preferably fiber) ISP right now. If you're connected to an electrical grid, then we can run fiber there.
The outliers are the people living off grid, in the middle of fucking nowhere, with no infrastructure. Or people RVing across the desert for whatever reason. Or people out on the water. Or in the sky. Whatever, those people are a great use for satellite internet.
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I think that is more a demonstration of the inevitable market failures of relying on the private sector to deliver critical public utilities than it is that Starlink is a solution to any problem that can't be solved better and cheaper.
Are there enough of them to really matter except as a post-facto justification for a self-licking ice cream cone?This is the second thread today in which I'm gonna make people big mad by calling Starlink that, but I refuse to believe that "middle a fuckin nowhere" represents enough edge cases to retroactively justify a service that mostly just rent-seeks on a problem caused by deregulation, privatization, and a shitty industry, to close a gap in organic demand between the amount SpaceX can theoretically launch to orbit and that which other parties actually need launched to orbit.
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I'm pretty sure the Trump administration will rescind IPV6 as too woke or too DEI. I mean, what are we doing allowing letters into our IP addresses?
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Yeah, I think that was coined by Ed Zitron. His podcast wore out its welcome for me because the central thesis (enshittification and rent-seeking has ruined tech and is ruining every other sector too) is basically a Ted talk and all the episodes just served to illustrate the point, but "the rot economy" is a pretty great phrase to describe it. And shit, someone needs to be calling bullshit on it.
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From experience, I can tell you two things that should give you pause before signing up with Starlink:
1) There's no way to reach a real person directly -- you have to send a message and hope for the best. This means that even simple customer-support requests can drag out over several days. On one occasion they called me to follow up on a case, but there was no way for me to initiate a call so I could get an issue resolved in a timely manner.
2) They're completely untrustworthy. They offered me $200 for my dish (I cancelled service when it became clear that Elon is not just eccentric but outright evil), then didn't send the money even after the lengthy post-delivery waiting period they'd specified had fully passed. When I contacted them to see what was going on, they said that they had tried to send me the money but my bank had refused it and Starlink "had no way to know this" (they certainly knew it during my interaction with them) -- to me this sure as hell looked like an attempt at a "silent failure" to their financial advantage (and when I called my bank they had NO indication that any attempt to send me money had been made). I think Starlink had tried to reverse part of the initial charge, even through WAY more than six months had passed and they absolutely should have known full well that this was no longer possible. They then asked for my checking account information to send me the promised $200; but instead of doing some sort of ACH debit, they sent a freaking wire transfer (without asking/telling me first) that incurred a $17 bank fee. When I raised hell about this, they said that this was the only way they did it and they weren't responsible for bank fees, and outright refused to compensate me for the reduction in the amount I'd been promised.
TLDR: Starlink is a shitty company that should be avoided if you care about decent service and not having your money stolen.
1) There's no way to reach a real person directly -- you have to send a message and hope for the best. This means that even simple customer-support requests can drag out over several days. On one occasion they called me to follow up on a case, but there was no way for me to initiate a call so I could get an issue resolved in a timely manner.
2) They're completely untrustworthy. They offered me $200 for my dish (I cancelled service when it became clear that Elon is not just eccentric but outright evil), then didn't send the money even after the lengthy post-delivery waiting period they'd specified had fully passed. When I contacted them to see what was going on, they said that they had tried to send me the money but my bank had refused it and Starlink "had no way to know this" (they certainly knew it during my interaction with them) -- to me this sure as hell looked like an attempt at a "silent failure" to their financial advantage (and when I called my bank they had NO indication that any attempt to send me money had been made). I think Starlink had tried to reverse part of the initial charge, even through WAY more than six months had passed and they absolutely should have known full well that this was no longer possible. They then asked for my checking account information to send me the promised $200; but instead of doing some sort of ACH debit, they sent a freaking wire transfer (without asking/telling me first) that incurred a $17 bank fee. When I raised hell about this, they said that this was the only way they did it and they weren't responsible for bank fees, and outright refused to compensate me for the reduction in the amount I'd been promised.
TLDR: Starlink is a shitty company that should be avoided if you care about decent service and not having your money stolen.
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I wonder what it is about runnig an ISP that requires you have the worst possible customer service imaginable.
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I am curious to know what is the bandwidth now a days? What kind of upload/download speeds are people seeing?
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Um, yes? Obviously?
If people get mad at you it's mainly because your comments are so wildly freaking disconnected from reality and you absolutely know better having been on Ars for 13 years with tens of thousands of comments, yet you insist on acting stupid for who knows why. You damn well fucking know what maritime or airline internet cost and performed, we've talked about it in the Ars comments plenty, the 4 figures even a super "cheap" basic BGAN terminal cost for kilobit per second performance or the 6 (six) figures on something higher end, which still would leave you with 500-1500ms latency and single megabit performance. Just $80 for your first 20 megabytes! How do you plan to run fiber or cellular to boats, planes or even campers worldwide? And even for terrestrial fixed connections, Starlink can flat out beat standard fiber in latency over long distances due to having a 42% speed advantage which is plenty enough to overwhelm the hundreds of km RTT penalty for intercontinental comms even in ideal circumstances, and obliterate it in semi-pathological ones.
But even just for residences, what do you imagine even a really good rollout would be and when? Like, looking at the the nordic countries for example, which have their own rural areas but are very wealthy and very well run, they achieve something like 75-85% fiber coverage from the looks of it. Which is amazing! But let's bump that up to 97% even. America alone has a population of around 340 million people. 3% of that would be 10.2 million. The average American household size is now about 2.5 people, so call that 4.08 million potential fixed connections in that really fantastic case. If every single one of them was on the cheaper $90/month that'd be $4.4 billion per year, just for that one single market segment of just the USA, nevermind the exact same sats and infrastructure can serve the rest of the planet at an extremely minimal extra marginal cost.
How is it possible for you to claim that's "rent-seeking"? When do you think the US, or Canada or Norway or Sweden for that matter will have 97% fiber coverage?
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Fiber deployments are running in the range of $25k - $50k per mile. If someone lives 15 miles out of down with three houses on the road, spending $125k per house would be a stupid waste of money. There are places like this and even further out all over the country.
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This is going to depend very heavily on local contention in your cell. FWIW the highest I've ever seen is ~220 down and 38 up. For awhile it did regularly stay below 100/20, all the way down to 60/7 for a period once, now it seems pretty consistently in the 100-180 down / 15-30 up range. This is with gen1 hardware, apparently the newest ones and business class stuff is supposed to do somewhat better (people have reported maximums above 300 down, something I have never seen) though again that's going to depend on contention at the end of the day. Dropoffs have become non-existent and latency has improved, the former no doubt due to raw sat numbers and network maturity, the latter perhaps helped by laser links (timeline lines up, but maybe other factors as well). But for raw bandwidth per cell I don't think any truly major leaps forward can happen until they have Starship putting up full size future gen sats in large numbers. Uptime has been as high as anything else I use, hundreds of days at a time (connected to a quality UPS to cover power outages/brownouts/generator weirdness).
So it blows away DSL ime, no contest (and obviously any poor souls still stuck on dial up or old HEO sat). Could potentially beat cable, though probably not a relatively modern upgraded one, beyond non-performance practical issues like if your cable provider are pathological assholes (I mean, more then normal even). Cellular/WISPs are highly variable, I know some that would definitely be much better if available and some worse. Some just different? Like it's pretty common for WISPs to offer symmetrical service, you might well prefer a pretty reliable 75/75 to higher variance 180/30 depending on what you're doing. Loses to fiber as a primary of course, though as highly independent infra I could see the attraction as a failover over if cellular was not available, we'll certainly consider it.
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