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Starlink Premium

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Re: Starlink Premium

#81

Tesla did the same ,,strategy'' when it couldn't deliver the $35k car, as scaling was too optimistic: get a premium version with much higher margins and make people buy that. There are lots of people for whom $500 is worth a great internet, as it helps them deliiver work significantly more work value.

I pre-paid Starlink for delivery last Spring and it never materialized. And see similar comments here from others on never yet receiving it after long waits.

So you may be onto something.

Re: Starlink Premium

#82
post #9

The: > UNLIMITED SERVICE LOCATIONS Almost seems designed to get people's hopes up only to squash them again. What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize. Announcing that: > Order as many Starlinks as needed and manage all of your service locations, no matter how remote, from a single account. Is niche, and is only going to confuse peo…

Over two years ago I emailed them about "sailing" starlink and actually got a decent reply back about it but have never seen anything else about it.

Why even write that if you aren't going to say what their response was?

Re: Starlink Premium

#83

The: > UNLIMITED SERVICE LOCATIONS Almost seems designed to get people's hopes up only to squash them again. What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize. Announcing that: > Order as many Starlinks as needed and manage all of your service locations, no matter how remote, from a single account. Is niche, and is only going to confuse peo…

The number of people who have a summer home is extremely high. Having two dishes, or one dish that can be used from two set points is very attractive. Lots of people spend the summer "at the cabin" even when the cabin isn't in the Hamptons.

Or they may live out of a motor home, but it only moves to travel between their regular winter destination and their regular summer destination. They stay in the same two parks all year except for the 4 days of travel in between.

Millions of USians fall into these two demographics. I'm sure plenty outside the US do, too.

Re: Starlink Premium

#84
post #27

I haven't check their prices at all till now and holy guacamole - for about half of their monthly price my ISP gives me up to 1 Gb/s FTTH without transfer limits (asymmetric connection - tho, not an issue; speed varies from city to city but I can't complain now - it's not the faulty copper line that made me more offline than online), unlimited VoIP phone and tv with almost 200 channels and HBO GO (not that I would wa…

Anyone with a fiber connection available is absolutely not the target market for starlink. It is meant for rural users with few better options. In fact, dense urban or suburban areas would overload the satellites, so subscribers in those areas will need to be limited.

I'm still not 100% convinced on the size of this market. Rural FTTH rollouts are happening and over the next 5-10 years I think will get everywhere you have grid electricity. I constantly see people on the starlink Reddit cancelling their preorders or service because they can get FTTH or cable.

There's no doubt it's an amazing technical achievement, and a huge improvement for many people. But I am somewhat struggling to see the business case for maintaining many thousands of satellites, which only last for a few years before requiring replacement, in a market that basically gets smaller each year (because more people can get FTTH or cable as rollouts increase).

Even worse, starlink performance will degrade as more users and/or average bandwidth use ticks up.

Re: Starlink Premium

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it needs to repeat messages more till you get a clear message through

Not sure about that? In a UDP based ping it's fire and forget so wouldn't repeat, so would show as packet loss not increased latency. Unless the physical layer is using more FEC and using longer "timeslots" to get to transmit the payload. But even that seems unlikely to cause major latency increases?

They may be using link-layer ARQ which resends corrupted packets instead of dropping them.

Re: Starlink Premium

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it needs to repeat messages more till you get a clear message through

Not sure about that? In a UDP based ping it's fire and forget so wouldn't repeat, so would show as packet loss not increased latency. Unless the physical layer is using more FEC and using longer "timeslots" to get to transmit the payload. But even that seems unlikely to cause major latency increases?

Maybe the dish is connecting to farther away satellites closer to the horizon due to packet losses on the first satellite?

Re: Starlink Premium

#87

$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500/mo for the service. Looks like it's targeting the enterprise market. The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I'm not an expert on this)? Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low…

> The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture $3k? Were they mining the metal by hand and then using only the most hipster blacksmiths shipped in from Portland to hand press the steel for the dish?

If I remember correctly there’s a fair bit of expensive electronics and fancy materials. The phase steered arrays I worked on in college were expensive and they were tiny. https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...

Re: Starlink Premium

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it needs to repeat messages more till you get a clear message through

Not sure about that? In a UDP based ping it's fire and forget so wouldn't repeat, so would show as packet loss not increased latency. Unless the physical layer is using more FEC and using longer "timeslots" to get to transmit the payload. But even that seems unlikely to cause major latency increases?

It's vanishingly rare for radio-based networks to actually rely on high level IP behavior for redelivery, as it's much faster to fix these issues on the single radio link than to wait for things to go round trip. The data link protocol typically has its own reliable delivery implementation that will result in multiple retries. This results in increased latency in poor network conditions. 802.11 behaves similarly.
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