Starlink cuts satellite dish price from $600 to $300 in excess-capacity areas
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Ah no n michigan. Will still have to face my phone just so to get the high speed.
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Starlink seems to be doing pretty well if they managed to get their terminal production cost under $500. Realistically speaking the terminal cost is the greatest hurdle in getting more customers. Also, if they manage to get the production costs under $300 (that's what Iridium terminal costs now) they can also aggressively gobble up the GEO customer base if they want. After all, if the terminal cost is low enough, nothing prevents them from providing some truly low-cost limited plans that would still be better than what GEO could offer in all metrics (since marginal costs for customers with low bandwidth are minimal).
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See Razor and Blades Model: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
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Hmm. l wonder if you can still put in a bogus service address and have the terminal shipped to your home, then change the service address....
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It is essentially science fiction coming true to have a phased array antenna in the GHz range as a consumer device which has a $300 price tag. Twenty years ago you needed to be a major world military to build such a thing and the price tag would be seven digits. That is essentially what electronically steered radar is just at much higher power output.
Most of the time I don't really think about it and it just works but the fact that Starlink dishes exist at all is kinda amazing. Add to it that they are in constant communication to a constellation of thousands of sats overhead is even more surreal.
Supposedly SpaceX has filed for FCC certification on a Starlink mini dish which is about half the size of standard and presumably lower power. I would switch in a heartbeat for my boat even if it has lower speeds because sweet jesus does Starlink suck down the watts.
Most of the time I don't really think about it and it just works but the fact that Starlink dishes exist at all is kinda amazing. Add to it that they are in constant communication to a constellation of thousands of sats overhead is even more surreal.
Supposedly SpaceX has filed for FCC certification on a Starlink mini dish which is about half the size of standard and presumably lower power. I would switch in a heartbeat for my boat even if it has lower speeds because sweet jesus does Starlink suck down the watts.
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They chop this stuff up so fine. Have an address in Oregon that we would like the service but it gets a sales savings for being low congestion...but no savings on monthly for being low congestion. How does that make any sense?
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Most likely; I got out for weeks at a time in places where there’s no cell service.
If I’m gonna for a day or two, I don’t bother with connectivity.
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So I just checked and the hardware for me would be $411.10 for the dish, wall mount, shipping and tax. A lot more reasonable than it used to be. But monthly service would be about $130 including tax which for the speeds they provide isn't a very good deal IMHO. But if you have no other choices it is a godsend.
I know Comcast has applied for Federal funds to run fiber out to our subdivisions but haven't heard if they were awarded or not. If they get green lighted we should have broadband available within the next 2-3 years hopefully and I'll just stick with my current 10-35Mbps rooftop microwave setup until then. But if they get turned down I'll probably bite the bullet and go with Starlink.
I know Comcast has applied for Federal funds to run fiber out to our subdivisions but haven't heard if they were awarded or not. If they get green lighted we should have broadband available within the next 2-3 years hopefully and I'll just stick with my current 10-35Mbps rooftop microwave setup until then. But if they get turned down I'll probably bite the bullet and go with Starlink.
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I suspect that to be mostly intended as sarcasm, but just in case let me note that the orbits of those particular birds don't "park" anywhere. Congestion probably has more to do with the density of ground stations.
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Yes, camping does mean different things to different people, and that's ok. For most people, it at least usually means getting out of their house/apartment, and going to live in temporary housing somewhere, usually in nature.
For some folks that means an RV/Camper with beds, air conditioning, a shower, microwave, stove, TV and a laptop.
For some people that means a tent, sleeping bags, maybe a plastic bag "shower" they hang from a tree limb, and cooking over a fire.
For some people it's a sleeping bag in an open-air Adirondack or lean-to shelter permanently installed at the campsite.
It's all camping.
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I guess they expect the user count to rise soon (so it will get removed from both savings), but it's still too low so it needs a bit of a boost. At least that is the only reason that would make sense. Of course it's also possible that someone just forgot to add it to (or remove it from) one of the lists.
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It seems a shame they removed the automatic alignment from the newer dishes in order to save money.
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Or knowing Comcast there is a non-zero chance they do what they have been doing for 30+ years now. Apply to for federal funds, get approved, keep the money, deploy nothing. In five years apply for more federal funds because the need for broadband is even more critical.
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Honestly it is a lot of complexity and worse the moving part complexity which is not great for long term reliability for not much utility. Even not aligned it works fine. This is more true now as they have increased the density of the sats.
Sure you should align it for best results but even roughly pointing north is fine. This isn't like a GSO dish where you have to perfectly get the azimuth and declination right.
In mobile application it isn't going to stay pointing North anyways and it works just fine. In fact those of us who were early adopters hacked the dishes to get them to lay flat because it trying to rotate all over the place as the boat/rv is also rotating just made a mess of thing. Otherwise eventually it got what I joking called gimbal lock in that it would get lost and never find the sats again. Once it would get in that state it seemed to search in all the wrong spots endlessly looking until you powered it off and on. Not sure if it was an edge case in the software or what. Cripple it so it can't move, stick it on a pole, and point it straight up and it has worked fine for over a year now long before fixed dishes were officially a thing.
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I am curious why some states have excess capacity. Upstate NY and Vermont have many remote areas. They seem to be states which should have reduced capacity.
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I'm not sure what the auto alignment is really good for. Aligning a gen 3 antenna is a 2 minute operation at setup, and doesn't need to be changed after initial setup, according to SpaceX. Simpler really is better here.
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Your comment made me wonder if there is a way you could buy Starlink, use it for 2-3 years, and then if fiber comes to your neighborhood, sell the Starlink hardware (at some discount like for $200) and transfer the account to a new person? Or do they not allow transfers?
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You can transfer it to a new person. SpaceX doesn't care. If you get a discounted dish you must keep that dish and plan (boats/mobile plans don't get discounted dish price) for a year (IIRC) before canceling/changing or you will be charged the discount amount.
Warning to anyone buying a used dish you must make sure the prior owner releases the dish from their account. Ask for a screenshot and also check the serial number on SpaceX sign up website. If they do not release it you own a paperweight. SpaceX will not help. You can not activate it. Zero exceptions. As far as SpaceX is concerned you aren't the owner of the dish until it is released by the prior owner. For all they know maybe you just stole a dish off someone's roof. Side note this setup also means the dishes are not frequent targets of thieves as a stolen dish is worthless except in tricking someone to buy a worthless dish.
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I think it's mainly a marketing issue?
I mean Connecticut isn't really a low-density state, and yet it's on that list of states elligible for the discount. I think those are just states where Starlink has failed to convince many people to subscribe.
It could be that in states like Connecticut, their cable, fiber, and 5G options are so good that there's little reason to get Starlink? In some of the very rural states, maybe folks just don't care that much about Internet? Or maybe they have good municipal ISP?
It's a great question, "why", but I suspect the answer has little to do with population density.
Also, specifically regarding NY state - I suspect the answer why they aren't on the list is that, since this is being done state by state, that while a few small parts of NY state might have reduced usage, overall the state probably has lots of Starlink subscribers.
Not so much in NYC or the dense suburbs near it - Starink doesn't work well in the dense areas. But I suspect in much of the state with a lower density, places like the outskirts of Buffalo, Rochester, Ithaca, Binghamton, Albany, Syracuse - they probably have lots of subscribers.
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How well does that work installing on a tower or three story roof?
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It is largely sarcasm. However I volunteer at a big thing in the desert near here and it’s notable that Starlink data rates first fall as people arrive and then gets quite usable again when we presume Elon is there.
i suspect that this is mostly an illusion, but it makes for good jokes.
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And as another poster mentioned, the auto-alignment stuff is extra hardware to have problems with - hardware that's exposed to the weather at that. I'll note that the rather sparse instructions that came with my earlier gen disk were mostly just some diagrams very short on actual words. I suppose that might have been to save the trouble of having multiple language versions of the instructions. I found the diagram unclear in regards to the alignment in that it looked like it was telling me to manually rotate that joint. Good thing I didn't use much force when I tried to do that or I'd probably have broken it.
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Well, if you're installing the antenna, you're already up there on the roof or tower, in nearly all cases (the only exception I can imagine is you're mounting it on a tip-up style radio mast). Aligning it is as simple as pointing the antenna North, waiting for it to connect, then looking at the app to determine if you need to rotate it on the mount, before tightening the mount down. The adjustment is only on the vertical rotational axis - the gen 3 "dishes" are designed to flat relative to the horizon. So, it's pretty simple. It's probably the least complicated or daring part of doing a mount at height.
(They also work pretty darned well when misaligned, for what it's worth. I checked mine at 15 degrees out, and saw no real degradation).
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It's underperforming the 5-50 Mbps that SpaceX advertises for the roaming service?
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Honestly mine never moves so I can see why they did this. Basically it moved once on the day I set it up. So as long as the manual alignment is straightforward I don't see a downside. And less internals to get messed up. A lot of people are paying for installers anyway.
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If the new Starlink antenna is a phased array, that would mean that to at least some extent it would be able to align itself without having to tip-tilt it. Does the new Starlink antenna have more give in its alignment requirements than the old antenna?
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All Starlink dishes are phased array antennas. The alignment regardless of manual or automatic only needs to be rough. The dish electronically steers the beams it just has to be pointed in the general rough right direction. Even that is likely not really necessary in my experience. Mobile dishes just point up in a random direction with a slight cant to let the water slide off and they work. The dish on my boat is essentially pointed up at nowhere in particular but I do have it slanted slight forward but in a day of sailing that means the dish is pointing every direction North, East, South, and West, plus heeling on its axis and it works fine.
I think the automatic alignment initially was due to the fact that the network was very sparse with entire orbits completely empty so the dish did some tricks to point towards the direction with the most sats. Today that isn't really needed. For stationary locations they still have you point it towards the "best" location because why not.
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The list of states that get discounted rates is really interesting. Big state, small state, large population, small population, there isn't much obvious pattern to it. Weirdly it seems to slightly favor liberal states over conservative states. It is probably something like states where ISPs are better run and have good coverage.
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To be fair, looking at what is actually involved with phased array dishes I've long thought that the manufacturers were ripping off the clients. They were historically very low volume products sold to organizations with deep pockets, so the prices were never anywhere near reality. If you were an ordinary person with an interest in one you were just plain out of luck.
It's basically just a bunch of fixed antennas controlled by some clever logic in an IC. The development costs are high due to the complexity of the math, but once you have that each copy should be pretty cheap to make, at least as far as satellite antennas go. It also helps a lot that Starlink is LEO so you don't need an enormous concentrator to get your link margin. You can be pretty sloppy with your pointing and still get a usable signal when the bird is that close.
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