Starlink takes page from cable firms with $10 monthly rental fee for hardware

Starlink, SpaceX's top moneymaker, also raised service prices by $5 to $10.

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[Tactical Finesse]

It sounds like Starlink is in the beginning stages of ISP enshittification with recurring unnecessary fees, constantly raising rates, and providing you hardware you can’t opt out of.

Gotta pay for that trillions-dollar compensation package for Musk somehow.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

But they're also telling those investors that their AI division has a $26.5 trillion addressable market, so the $1.6 trillion telecommunications addressable market seems downright reasonable by comparison... possible or not.

Remember that time that serious professional money ghouls said that the Metaverse was a $30,000,000,000,000 investment opportunity, with a straight face...and weren't laughed out of the room?

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Bringing work with you when you're not working is fucking stupid and people need to knock that shit off. But streaming a movie or something would surely make shitting in the woods less awful.

That would depend entirely on the movie. I'd rather shit in the woods in the dark and wipe my butt with poison ivy that watch the Melania "movie" or "documentary" or WTF the right wing revisionists are classifying it as.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Not so idle question: How many miles of fiber can be laid for the cost of a satellite launch?

A Falcon 9 vehicle is $67milllion USD in 2025 money.

https://spacenexus.us/guide/space-launch-cost-comparison

Now, trenching fiber varies, a lot. Depending on if you are going through virgin rural farmland, or through a heavily urbanized area where you have to jackhammer out concrete. From maybe $20,000/mile in Nowhere... to $200,000/mile in downtown anywhere. So anywhere from 3,400 miles of fiber to 335 miles for the cost of one Falcon 9.

Now 3,400 miles sounds like a lot of miles of fiber. But, for reference, my rather average US city of 300,000 people that has sprawled over 80 sq miles...has 2,700 miles of roads to service all the R1 housing stock that is most of the developed land. If you're going to do fiber-to-home to every house, it'll take probably 3,000 miles of fiber and trenching**

**Sidenote, my city DOES have fiber-to-home to every R1 house in the city. That is permanently dark and will never be used. Before Time Warner got bought by Spectrum...they bought a State law making it illegal for a public utility to compete in the same "market" as a private corporation. So our municipal fiber system is permanently illegal.