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SpaceX does not plan to add 'tiered pricing' for Starlink satellite internet service, president says
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell does not think the company will add "tiered pricing" for its direct-to-consumer Starlink satellite internet service, which is currently offered at $99 a month in limited early access.
"I don't think we're going to do tiered pricing to consumers. We're going to try to keep it as simple as possible and transparent as possible, so right now there are no plans to tier for consumers," Shotwell said, speaking at the Satellite 2021 "LEO Digital Forum" on a virtual panel on Tuesday.
[...] In October, SpaceX began rolling out early Starlink service in a public beta that now extends to customers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and New Zealand – with service priced at $99 a month in the U.S., in addition to an upfront cost for the equipment needed to connect to the satellites.
[...] Musk's company plans to expand Starlink beyond homes, asking the Federal Communications Commission to widen its connectivity authorization to "moving vehicles," so the service could be used with everything from aircraft to ships to large trucks.
[...] Shotwell said SpaceX has "made great progress on reducing the cost" of the Starlink user terminal, which originally were about $3,000 each. She said the terminals now cost less than $1,500, and SpaceX "just rolled out a new version that saved about $200 off the cost."
See also: SpaceX's Starlink terminal production costs have dropped over 50%, reveals president
Satellite operators weigh strategies to compete against growing Starlink network
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:22AM (7 children)
any of you actually have some experience with this? cost (including the equipment), latency, etc.?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:07AM (1 child)
If you have no experience with the internet, that is pretty old fashioned.
You probably don't even have a microchip in your brain, lol.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:18AM
AC-to-AC, why are you here? Illiterate cocksucker, go back to slashdot.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:48AM (1 child)
From what I recall about when I last looked into satellite internet a decade or so ago, Starlink is offering much better service for about the same monthly rate, but the installation cost is higher. The way I'm reading this, their per-user costs are high enough that it isn't economical to offer lower tiers and they are currently bandwidth limited both by the satellites and at the ground stations (only 5 of the 32 they've asked for in the US have been approved) so faster service isn't an option yet either.
The big limiter I see on the low end is the cost of the antenna. I'm not sure how much or how soon they can bring the antenna price down with mass production, but the service charges must be enough to pay for the antenna to be worthwhile.
On the high end they need to launch many more satellites and build more ground stations, both in the US and internationally, before they have the bandwidth for higher tiers. Starship should alleviate the satellite problem but the ground station problem is tied up by regulators.
The third problem I see for them going forward is radio interference from the 5G cellphone network. Considering the other games being played with cellphone service it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this is a deliberate play by the phone companies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:11AM
I'd be looking to build my fleet of dishes to 50 full price dishes for my vehicle fleet, and another 50 luggable ones around the world. Not a great cost compared with the cost of vehicles or flights.
However the additional $120k a year service charge may start to sting if they aren't used frequently. It's easier to justify the up front capital fee than an ongoing revenue fee. Pay as you go per GB, or per active terminal hours, would be a better solution for us.
(For comparison my team manages about 450 inmarsat bgan termianls around the world, our deal means we pay per megabyte - which means they can sit idle in a cupboard in Timbuktu for a couple of years, but then if we need them they are there and can be deployed quickly)
This requires starlink to support movable dishes of course.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:12AM (2 children)
I have Hughesnet. It's about comparable to two 56k modems much of the time. Sometimes faster, sometimes nothing. Usually a full second of ping, sometimes two or more.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:15AM
I should add, Hughesnet uses a small number of high altitude satellites, they will never approach Starlink speeds.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:02AM
Massive experience with GEO - BGans, Tooways, Vipersats etc. Latency in the 600 (dedicated) to 1200 (background) ms range, bandwidth expensive and limited (bgans are in the 1mbit range, vipersats how we use them will give us 3 or 4mbit for the frequency we use)
Limited experience with starlink, latency is in the 50ms range, bandwidth in the tens of megabits in both directions.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:25AM (6 children)
When do you ever hear about companies bragging publicly about reducing costs for their customers? I think I'm getting dizzy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:39AM (5 children)
They need to reduce the costs if they want the service to be profitable (with home users; finance and military could be lucrative immediately).
They aren't bragging about the price the user pays (yet), that's still $500 during this beta. $3k was what the terminal cost SpaceX. So they were losing up to $2,500 on the terminal.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:57AM (4 children)
Finance and military could trivially pay the terminal cost but there isn't enough demand from them to pay for the satellites. That cost needs to be spread out across many users to be worthwhile.
To recover that $2,500 loss, assuming 25% of the $100 monthly rate is cost recovery and interest is not considered, would take 100 months to break even. That is over eight years. Reducing that cost is the make-or-break item for the entire project.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:30AM (3 children)
I don't mean to suggest that military or finance would use the consumer user terminal equipment. They could pay it trivially, but they will probably use something more customized.
Military (starting with both U.S. Air Force [reuters.com] and Army [spacenews.com]) could pump in billions if they find it useful. Hundreds of millions might be more realistic in the short term.
You can find absurd estimates out there for how much the finance customers might pay:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-network-will-make-over-50-billion-per-year.html [nextbigfuture.com]
I don't know how much they will get from finance, but it could potentially dwarf the ISP revenue. Should be more than zero, at least.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:54AM (2 children)
I doubt they'll get much from finance, as the satellite link, even for low-orbit satellites, adds latency simply from the fact that the satellites are more than 100 km above earth. It cannot beat a direct microwave link, for purely geometric reasons. Add to this that the stock exchanges are in well-known fixed locations, so the everywhere-connectivity aspect of the satellites doesn't matter either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:19AM
NY to Chicago is 800 miles. Even with 1000 foot antennas you'd need a dozen repeaters to bounce you between the two locations.
Direct fibre is 6.5ms at best, the link you quote says microwave drops this by 5%, or 0.3ms, so 6ms at best.
Going via starlink might not even need a laser, it would be a 1500km single hop bounce off a 500km high satelite between the two, so about 5ms.
For NY to Tokyo though, oh boy are you saving time if you stay in optically switched satelite hops vs fibre.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:21AM
I think they were touting the international routes. London - Tokyo - New York etc. Over those distances microwave links are difficult and Starlink will be much faster than fibre.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:57PM (1 child)
Notice the corporate speak is to emphasize over and over the word consumer, so they're practically admitting that non-consumer will be the opposite.
"Someday" the ground station will be the equivalent cost of an ESP32 or ESP8266, or at least it'll be cheaper, anyway, and they'll have tiered "IoT" pricing to put "Things Network" and similar LORA business models, out of business.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 08 2021, @06:08PM
I think you're reading what you want to read. The most visible part of Starlink is the consoomer ISP business (I don't think anybody thinks of military/finance until I bring it up). Right now that's a flat $500 for the user terminal and $100/month, at least while it's still in "beta". I thought they would end up doing at least 2 tiers when the service goes live. For example, $50/month for 100 Mbps and $75/month for 1 Gbps. Many rural users would be fine with a cheaper, but still fast tier. Now it looks like there will be only one price for everyone... and that includes overseas.
Now I suspect that SpaceX might "guarantee" something like 100 Mbps but let the service spike to nearly 1 Gbps if usage is low in your area. And they might degrade the service for vehicular users to guard against the scenario where 100 Starlink RVs congregate in a parking lot or campsite and compete for the same handful of satellites.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:54PM (5 children)
on a side note, i was wondering if it's possible to buy a rocket from SpaceX.
like you can buy a plane from boeing or airbus or whatnot.
or you can buy a ship.
so like, could a country, say uhmm ...errr... fictionalistan buy a Falcon 9 and park it at the spaceX "marina" then go about launching weather-observing satellites (must have for every country), com-satellites and land management sats for their own population? then maybe also offer to send stuff to orbit for smaller countries that don't have enough cash or dough?
i mean, every other country has their own airlines and they don't really build them planes themselfs eh?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:51PM
Boeing, etc. don't provide routine airliner maintenance, that's up to the airlines to hire the right people and for them to maintain the fleet of planes.
Space companies don't work like that, partly, because it is rocket science. The only thing keeping a rocket from being a giant missile is how it's used. The same could be said for airplanes, but they carry a lot less fuel and make a less spectacular fireball on impact. So, I guess the real issue is cost and expertise. Making the rocket is only part of the equation. A significant part for sure, but it's not quite so user-friendly as an airplane.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:40PM
Fictionalistan would be barred from getting a rocket (which is basically a missile) by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a23080/spacex-elon-musk-itar/ [popularmechanics.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations [wikipedia.org]
Falcon 9 is probably a bad choice too since it's not fully reusable like Starship will be. Fictionalistan might not be a great place for rocket launches (better to be near the equator, and it needs pad/infrastructure built, possibly costing more than the rocket).
So instead you have SpaceX launching satellites for small countries from the U.S. Turkmenistan's first satellite in April 2015, CubeSats for Bangladesh (BRAC Onnesha), Ghana (GhanaSat-1), and Mongolia (Mazaalai) in June 2017, CubeSats for Costa Rica and Kenya alongside CRS-14 in April 2018, Arabsat-6A for Saudi Arabia/the Arab League in April 2019, etc.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @11:50PM (2 children)
Down the road, I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of operation. But there are two big obstacles. As already noted, rockets make decent weapons, so they are heavily regulated. There are also huge technology theft risks.
Second, you need a lot of investment just to launch one of these things. You need a launch site, you need a highly skilled crew to launch, retrieve, and maintain these vehicles. Who will build that site? Who will train your crew? SpaceX could do that in theory, but they don't have the people right now to do that and to maintain their launch tempo. They also don't have the interest since your launches would compete with SpaceX business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:23AM (1 child)
thanks but not much "observing" required really.
we all heard the hilarious quote of "throw away plane after it flew from NY to LA".
and then, the other day i downloaded the documentary about spaceX and the story to lead up to DEMO-1, mainly because of some hi-def shots of ... u guessed it: ROCKETS!
anyways it pinged in my mind when i saw the eyes of the lady in charge (?) of the refurbishment hanger of F9 ... "well, are you gonna send us 'em rocket refurbishment apprentices already?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @07:56AM
I still disagree on that. There's a surprising amount of mileage in that observation.
While it is natural to compare orbital launch with the nearest analogous industry, commercial air (both passenger and cargo), it's still easy to miss some ways (that haven't happened yet) that spaceflight can be more like air flight. This is one of those ways. SpaceX is unusual in the extreme vertical nature of the business. They not only build their vehicles almost completely from scratch rather than contract out (which makes them near unique in aerospace, not just orbital launch). But they're also one of their biggest customers with Starlink (and possible future business like Mars colonization).
But there are some things in common. Every orbital launch manufacturer in the world launch their own rockets. Nobody just build rockets for someone else to use. You don't start to see that sort of business until you go to some types of small suborbital rockets (especially when you get to the high side of the hobby business, there's a bunch of people who can make large hobby-scale solid motors and launching such rockets requires relatively light training).
There's no reason SpaceX or a competitor couldn't reduce their market scope to providing launch vehicles and launch/maintenance crew training (with the only launches being tests of the vehicles). That's what Boeing and Airbus (as well as most other airplane manufacturers) do.