The former $240/mo was not outrageous to begin with?…
These Elon fanboys just love getting scammed by him. I can almost hear the little pay piggies squealing now.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Enough Musk Spam
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I looked into Starlink years ago when I was RVing. It came out to over $600 up front in equipment costs, THEN $240 a month or w/e. And it's not like Elon wasn't a piece of shit back then, either. $50 a month for T-Mobile "5G at home" with no upfront or hidden costs did the trick nicely and bridged the gap until I found a place with cheap fiber. Now I have 2.5Gbps up and down and it's still less than half the price of Starlink before this price hike.
Starlink makes sense for the scenario it was designed fill the gap for. A lack of any other terrestrial options.
Legacy satellite has always been terrible, but the only option in many rural areas, and obviously the middle of nowhere. Starlink is an insanely reliable and decent deal in most of those circumstances. That's it's bread and butter.
But if you have literally any other option, it's usually not the best choice, it's not meant to be the best choice, it's intended for use where it's likely the only choice.
One of my brothers is in Alaska right now. It’s wild to me that he even gets internet where he’s at. Where he’s at they don’t even have mailboxes just PO Boxes.
He is sharing 1TB a month among ~60 people tho
I know one guy where he's just on a damn mountain. Not many other options.
Not saying it's the option I'd take, just saying. If you're in the sticks in a red state...
Yeah there are always exceptions of course. I’ve seen some in that position able to get away with direct line-of-sight connections for a reasonable rate, but it depends heavily on the layout of the surrounding mountains and location of the service provider plus you have to shell out for an antennae or dish. For any wondering, that’s almost always cheaper than the Starlink sign up costs.
Then again, if internet is important to someone, gotta consider if mountain-side living is the right choice to begin with. I’m sure your acquaintance has his reasons though!
Like it or not, it's the only option for high speed internet for large swaths of the world. ViaSat is the only competitor and they're even worse: slower, unusably high latency and ridiculously low data caps.
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Damn, maybe you should move to a radical leftist city where fiber internet is $50 a month.
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I only have this to say: Fuck the sky pollution. Starlink has been ruining stargazing and star photography and Elon lied about its impact. He claimed they would be invisible with his amazing paint but they're still visible and fuck it up for people who enjoy watching the stars.
I see them all the time without a camera. They are bright as the stars when they pass over.
pros and cons...
pros:
- internet in remote places
cons:
- at the cost of literallt everything else
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Starlink was never a viable business prospect. It never will be. Anybody who signed up to Starlink was just waiting for this to happen without knowing it.
well it might’ve worked if he didn’t turn out to be a fascist… but since most people don’t want to support that, kinda fucks up the business model.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
Exactly. The business isn't remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it's not going to grow.
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I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
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Strange, I've downloaded almost 6TiB over the last month so far and my bill is still $120/mo.
EDIT: This appears to be for global priority customers (movable dish between addresses, on boats, etc) and seems to be because he's increasing his data cap by choice, not because rates are actually getting hiked. Us normal residential customers are the same as always. Fuck Musk anyway, but this one seems to be a non-issue.
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I thought starlink was just an alibi company to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, and make SpaceX appear profitable on paper?
Starlink is owned by spaceX so they've never purchased a rocket, they just launch
And because of starlink SpaceX will be an insanely profitable company. Starlink is already bankrolling the very expensive starship development.
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I live in a rural area. We were thinking about starlink a few years ago, then fiber came to our area. Thank goodness. We've literally had no issues, speeds are amazing, and no price hikes.
Fibre is racist and woke, that's what tramp said at least.
Given his steady diet of hamberders, I'm sure he does think fiber is woke
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Oh, now it's worse than every satellite internet company I know. Shame I recommended it to someone because I thought it would be reliable and remain cheap.
Amazon is launching a competing service on its own satelites.
Maybe they'll collide with each other.
Probably, and well be forever imprisoned on the planet in that scenario because we won't be able to launch anything for a long long time again.
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I am unsurprised. I thought it would take longer for it to become outrageously priced, but here we are. this specific pricing is extra crazy IMO.
In any case, I scoffed at the pricing when it was almost reasonable during their trial phases.... Back then IIRC it was like $100-150 usd/mo. or something.... That's too much for me already. Seems like they've previously increased it to around $200-300 and now they've lost their damn minds.
Star link was never economically sensible, price hikes were inevitable. There's just too few people in their target audience and too many satellites that are simply too costly to maintain at the levels they previously had. I hoped, for the sake of anyone who required starlink for a reasonable Internet connection speed, that the business plans and corporate users would shoulder most of the cost, but here we are.
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And this is why capitalism utterly sucks at providing public services.
It's not really capitalism anymore if the CEO runs the government too.
Idk what else the USA has to do to show the obvious oligarchy y'all have.
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I wouldn't use this service unless I literally had no other option. But sadly "no other option" is why they are able to jack up the prices and change the terms and conditions as they feel like with impunity.
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Slide to switch plan
Ooooh, that's cutesy.
How about "Point a firearm at the screen and scowl menacingly to cancel the service"
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