SpaceX’s Starlink finally reveals its satellite broadband pricing for rural America: At $99 a month, it’s a good deal
- Reference: 1603845236
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/28/spacexs_starlink_pricing/
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That is not a great deal if you live in a well-connected city where you can typically get those speeds for between $40 and $80 a month. But it is a good deal for many living in rural America, particularly since in many of those areas it simply isn’t possible to get anything above 10Mbps or even dial-up speeds.
That is why Starlink has specifically targeted rural areas, with their well documented lack of broadband, emailing customers that have expressed an interest in its service this week with additional details.
In roughly 40 per cent of rural America, there is no broadband connection by modern standards: something that has become of ever greater importance, especially in political circles, during the current pandemic where millions of people are more reliant on internet connections than ever before. Plus many new technologies in industries like farming work most effectively when they have the ability to connect or share data over the internet.
Azure in Spaaaaaaaaace: Microsoft signs up with SpaceX's satellite net constellation Starlink [1]READ MORE
And so while the $99 a month is a lot of money, in many cases it will be the only way to get a decently fast internet connection and so will likely be worth it. In many cases where broadband access actually is available, Starlink’s service will also be cheaper, at least in terms of dollars-per-Mbps.
In [2]stats from Broadband Now, which closely tracks this issue, the cost of DSL in rural areas of the US is between $1.50 and $2.50 per Mbps. Starlink said its service will offer between 50Mbps and 150Mbps - which means a cost of between 66 cents and $2 per Mbps. In other words, cheaper in many cases.
There are other issues however: Starlink customers would have to stump up a hefty $499 for the equipment needed to make it work: a phased-array user terminal (that the company hypes as “more advanced than what’s in fighter jets”), a mounting tripod and a Wi-Fi router. That a steep upfront fee and a degree of lock-in to Starlink’s service.
Latency
And then there’s the latency issue. Starlink said that it “expects to see… latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the system.”
That range is basically the same as that currently experienced in rural states. Broadband Now’s most recent [3]quarterly review puts Alaska at 51ms and Oregon at 20ms, with most states with large rural areas somewhere in the middle (Oklahoma 30ms; Utah 35ms; Montana 46ms).
But there is perhaps a level of confidence within SpaceX that it will hit that target because its email also said “as we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically. For latency, we expect to achieve 16ms to 19ms by summer 2021.”
The biggest problem? A recognition that “there will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.” No one wants to pay $499 upfront and $99 a month just to see their connection repeatedly die.
However, if you take Starlink at face value, the pricing says one thing very clearly: it is indeed the most viable and cheapest solution right now - and likely for the next five years - for rural America to get decent internet speeds.
Expert view
We asked Broadband Now for its thoughts and editor-in-chief Tyler Cooper told The Register : “Starlink's ‘Better Than Nothing Beta’ is priced at $99. However, the company has not confirmed that this will be the retail price for the commercial service itself when it launches, and I'm not overly confident it will be.
“The initial network performance claims are interesting, and SpaceX indicates that they expect latency and speeds to ‘improve dramatically,’ so I remain hopeful that the service will prove to be a tangible alternative for Americans who've been long-overlooked by the wired broadband market.”
Starlink does have one big advantage, even at $99 a month: it’s real, unlike the constant promises by the cable industry, regulators like the FCC and even Congress, who have promised rural areas fast internet access for a decade and so far failed to deliver.
It is no coincidence that just today the FCC [4]passed both a 5G fund and a new proposal to use TV white spaces - both of which can also be used to provide fast internet access to more remote areas - and lauded them as a way to bridge the digital divide.
It’s almost as if the threat of losing business to companies like Starlink has spurred the cable industry, and the regulatory framework that cossets it, into action at last. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/20/azure_space/
[2] https://broadbandnow.com/research/digital-divide-broadband-pricing-state-zip-income-2019
[3] https://broadbandnow.com/research/q3-broadband-report-2020
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/27/fcc_net_neutrality/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Outside America
Needs a ground station relatively near the subscriber in order to get reasonable latency. They basically bounce off a satellite back down to your nearest ground station.
While SpaceX are saying they'll be doing a mesh network allowing data to chain between satellites before coming back down, I don't believe that's working and it also must greatly increase the latency - path length and store-and-forward time.
So you probably need to have a ground station within a few hundred to maybe a thousand miles of you. I presume they're intending to build them around the world, as it should also make for good ship-based internet (and perhaps aircraft), most of which currently use geostationary sats and thus have huge latency.
Re: Outside America
You need four things for Starllink:
1) Regulatory approval from your country. For now that is USA + Canada but Starlink will seek approval elsewhere.
2) Not too close the the poles or (for the time being) the equator. Northern Canada is out unless Starlink launches satellites with a higher inclination to cover the poles. The satellites race over the equator and are widely spaced there but they bunch up when they transition from going north to south - or south to north. When more satellites are launched the gap around the equator will close. Southern Australia should be OK now and Texas should be good real soon now.
3) One day Starlink will launch satellites that talk to each other with lasers but for now there must be a ground station within 600km so that satellites can connect to the internet at the same time as connecting to customer terminals.
4) A bunch of other customers who think US$500+US$100/month is a good deal. (Remember there is a delivery cost and sometimes an antenna mount cost if the standard tri-pod is not a good choice for your home.)
Re: Outside America
Northern Canada is out unless Starlink launches satellites with a higher inclination to cover the poles. The current birds are going up at 53° inclination, however the current phase also includes shells planned at 70, 74 and 81 once 53/54 is populated, so it will eventually pretty much everyone over the next several years.
Re: Outside America
Each nation regulates radio communication (including satellite up/down-links) as they see fit. That an American company would start with the same American regulator (FCC or Federal Communications Commission) they must regularly beg for temporary permission to communicate with their rockets during launch should not be surprising. Australia and other mostly-English-speaking countries with a heritage of British Common Law have a leg up on getting in next, followed by nations who ask nicely and offer reliable local partners (as opposed to The Leader's worthless nephew.)
Local government or foundations offering beta-test incentives to equip underserved communities would appear to be welcome, so encourage your Civil Masters appropriately.
Meanwhile over here in Blighty, in 2020, many industrial parks in the capital city of London are lucky if they can get anything faster than 6Mbps downstream and crucially for remote workers a suffocating upstream crawl of 0.7Mbps. All courtesy of copper ADSL.
Broadband running over 4G isn't much better. 20Mbps down and 10Mbps+ upstream when you first boot up the modem/router. Except it rapidly slows down til it can barely muster 1Mbps in either direction.
Compared with what's available in many rural areas - and some urban if you're the poor schmuck at the end of a 70 year old bit of copper - the latency isn't even close to an issue. There's nothing that will push up your latency faster than running out of bandwidth and a lot of rural internet is shockingly bad - my parents never saw more than 2mbit/s in leafy Surrey.
I'm currently showing 10ms to theregister.co.uk and 15ms to bbc.co.uk over broadband in London. 40ms with decent bandwidth is just fine and will allow all the streaming services - Netflix etc. to work.
Be careful what you wish for
Rural American here, at the end of a 5 Mbps microwave link. That link is provided by a local ISP, a one-man shop. He's capable and responsive and this service is fast and reliable enough for browsing, e-commerce, and remote technical work: everything I need or want. I don't need anything faster; what would I do with it? The only thing people want more bandwidth for is to watch television. When I lived in a major city, I also did business with an independent local ISP, another one-man shop. It cost more than CableCo's offering but when I had trouble I called up the owner (an engineer) and he put things right. It was worth it there and it's worth it here. Because I don't have any interest in consuming media, more bandwidth would be a waste of money. If I wanted to be part of that culture I would have stayed in the city.
Worst of all, if the government comes along and subsidises CableCo, that will probably put my ISP out of business and leave me with nothing. At best, I'll have to choose between doing business with the most hated corporations in America -- sending my money off to some fatcat CEO in Virginia or New York while sitting on hold with Mumbai every time I need someone to tell me to reboot my router -- and having nothing at all. Very likely I will choose nothing, because principles matter, which means this subsidy effort will have the opposite of the nominally desired effect of getting more people better access to the Internet. In reality it's just another handout to their corporate cronies who will use it to crush the decent people providing useful services, then jack up their prices while providing the worst customer service of any corporations in any industry. Our tax money at work!
As for Starlink, the only reason this is newsworthy is because it's Mr Musk's deal and apparently anything he does is newsworthy even if others have done it all decades ago. HughesNet already offer expensive high-latency satellite Internet access with huge setup costs. They apparently make so much money from it that they can afford to send me junk mail advertising their service at least once a month. That's exactly why enterprising types with a bit of technical background lease mountaintops, buy a few radio licenses, and set themselves up in the ISP business. It's the neighbourly thing to do, and profitable to boot.
Mr Musk and Washington can both take a hike. Leave us alone; we don't want or need your "help".
Outside America
Given these satellites are in low earth orbit I guess they'll be whizzing past most of the planet as the come back around to make their next pass, will this be available outside the states or is it just for the 'mericans?
I can think of a few places here in 'straya that would appreciate this.