That's affordable!
Starlink Maritime
61–70 of 530 posts
Re: Starlink Maritime
#62Only $5k a month! What a bargain.
Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
Re: Starlink Maritime
#63"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
- This is a more niche product (just due to sheer numbers). Therefore, supporting it for each user will have higher overheads. - Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this). - Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while. The next step will likely be commercial air…
Astrospace is also planning mobile broadband trough the satellites, their target audience also rural areas, I wonder they will support ocean as well, if so that would help competition.
Re: Starlink Maritime
#64The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you wh…
Not if you're loading from a UK IP they don't (I'm assume they geotarget pricing; the non-maritime pages display prices in GBP and the maritime just gives a max download speed)
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
Re: Starlink Maritime
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. More like: commercial and military vessels
Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff. An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
Re: Starlink Maritime
#66The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you wh…
This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
Re: Starlink Maritime
#67I wonder if i can expense this as my WFH setup
Re: Starlink Maritime
#68Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere:
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90/mo
SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00/mo
SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00/mo
SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00/mo
SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00/mo
SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00/mo
SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00/mo
SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00/mo
But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
Re: Starlink Maritime
#69Beware, their price automatically switches to local currency based on IP address, but keeps the $ sign. It's not that expensive.
Re: Starlink Maritime
#70The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you wh…
This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
It’s amazing we’ve reached the point where that’s possible.