Hooking up to Starlink might be pricier than you thought Prices are rising for customers of both Elon Musk's Starlink Internet service and his SpaceX rockets, with "excessive levels of inflation" to blame. An email to users posted on Reddit showed a hike from $499 to $549 for Starlink deposit holders waiting for hardware, and a jump to $599 for new orders. The monthly service price …
Someone has to subsidise the costs of Musk's own Starlink launches. Especially if they're still launching obsolete satellites while figuring out how to get Starship into orbit.
Still, in typical Musk fashion, tax payers will absorb the increase. Unless maybe a government asks an awkward question about Musk's internal costs vs the price they're being charged, and if that's legal.
But is it actual competition, or predatory pricing to buy market? So it'd be interesting to see Starlink's launch costs vs OneWeb's quote.
Or I guess there's scope to analyse the price increase wrt commodity prices to get an idea of inflation vs margin improvement. Also not sure if Musk's fraccing operation in Boca Chica. Presumably selling 'raw' gas would offset the costs of pure CH4 fuel.
Starlink has plenty of competition. There's the traditional satellite internet proviers, who are expensive and have restrictive monthly data caps. But the biggest competition is the traditional earth based telecoms providers. They could have provided fast broadband to every person on the planet but decided that excessive profits and asking governments to subsidise their networks was more important. They could have expanded their wire, fibre, or mobile networrks to cover everyone. But apparently it costs more to dig a trench and lay some wires to the nearest town than it does for Elon to concieve, design, manufacture, and launch thousands of satellites which provide amazing connections.
No ISP can be bothered to "invest" because the cost of installation is in the tens of thousands, even for a short run of fibre, which only goes to one house, for which they can then charge perhaps £10 a month more for. The economics only make sense in a city where you can connect an entire block of flats for a single installation over a few hundred metres to the nearest fibre enabled cabinet.
If you have to run a cable 5 miles to get to a village with a few hundred people, probably only a third of which are interested then it's not actually economically viable to do, especially since ISP's are allowed to charge full rates for ADSL1 level performance anyway.
Going around would still mean getting permissions. Which could get even more complicated if that's a public road. It can be a lot of paperwork figuring out who owns land, asking for wayleaves, negotiating those and then starting work. And it gets even more FUN! if the landowner knows about ransom strips.
Lasers can be a good alternative, but not without risks, ie link being obstructed. Plus I think crossing public land might need licensing.
But apparently it costs more to dig a trench and lay some wires to the nearest town than it does for Elon to concieve, design, manufacture, and launch thousands of satellites which provide amazing connections ...
... which cost about five times as much as a landline connection. If the market would allow BT and its resellers to charge £417 for setup and £83/month for the connection, we'd all be on fibre already. Well, you'd all be on fibre, 'cos I am, but you know what I mean.
Latency might not be as high as you think.
These are LEO satellites, so often the signal isn't crossing thousands of km of space. And if there's inter-satellite transmission, the speed of light through the atmosphere and vacuum of space, even in LEO which is a tad less vacuumy than higher orbits, is signficantly faster then through fibre optics.
Swings and roundabouts though. At some point sat-to-sat relaying will start to add more latency than fibre-exchange-fibre routes.
Lets say 500km orbit. And you are not directly underneath one of them. Then there is the relay and from one bird to another, and then to the ground segment. You would have clocked up at least a couple of thousand of space miles.
Elon's 20ms latency is best case. What do the real world figures show for different locations would be interesting. You can do sub ms in a city and 20ms cross continent. I am guessing about 50ms at least for the pizza bozes
with laser linking between the LEO birds, intercontinental latency via starlink is likely to be LOWER than via fibre-optic connection
It's been speculated for quite some time that once the constellations are sufficiently working to interlink financial centres a large chunk of Starlink income will come from stockmarket firms - especially in the asia-Europe/USA market
No-one likes price increases, but SpaceX have done more to cut launch costs than anyone else. Why are NASA using them to get to the ISS? Because they are reliable and cheap. So instead of being subsidised by tax payers they are actually saving the tax payer money. Of course the biggest saving would be to defund space, but that's a different question.
"internal costs vs the price they're being charged"
That's called profit. Every good business has some. American businesses seem to be driven to maximise it above all else.
If the retail cost is cheaper than the competition (by a large margin), why would anyone care how low their internal costs are? Plus, they're using the profit to develop the next generation of launch vehicle to make it even cheaper in future, in the process providing some very high tech jobs etc.
Have you tried sourcing electric components lately?
Or aerospace materials like carbon fibre, epoxies, high strength aluminum-, steel- and titanium-alloys?
Consumer inflation may be at 7-8% right now.
Specialized materials have seen price increases from 50 to 100%. Brokers charge up to 2500% of pre upset prices for some components.
And that is if there is anything to be found at all.
The price increases announced by Starlink will most likely not cover the increased cost of purchasing.
Moan as much as you will.. Many industries will have trouble producing at all in the coming months.
It's not so much moaning, simply questioning if price increases are justified. Especially as price increases are of course themselves inflationary. A Falcon is probably a bit large to fit in the Bank's shopping basket though.
But Musk's been hit with big cost increases for stuff like nickel and lithium, making 'renewables' even less viable. Politicians might even start noticing that. But they'd still have political challenges. During WW2 there were anti-profiteering laws, and there have also been price controls.
I suspect that the anti-profiteering laws will not work in this case, since almost all available electronics components must be sourced from China, where I suspect, a number of new millionaires will start showing up.
I honestly do think that a number of western manufacturers will be not able to rise their prices suficciently to cover the additional cost for what is going on right now.
A price hike of 10-.20% will not cover it for many products. Let us just hope that things will normalize at some point.
Regrettably Vladolf Pulter took over when Covid started to become manageable.
"Someone has to subsidise the costs of Musk's own Starlink launches."
Starlink have made it clear in the past that they'd been subsidising the price of dishes and service for early adoptors. That pricing model couldn't last forever
Hopefully things will stabilise (or drop) as time goes on. The current pricing model keeps people in poorer countries (especially africa and asia essentially locked out and they're where the big markets really are (billions of customers), not the rich ones.
Falcon 9 has the longest successful launch record (number of flights) of any rocket and breaks the record wih every flight. The nearest competition is not Atlas or Delta either, it is Soyuz-U which managed an unbroken run of 100 successful flights vs Falcon 9 with 112+ successful flights in a row.
The Falcon 9 rocket has launched over 140 times, of those one mission failed in June 2015. In January it exceeded the total number of flights of the Space Shuttle (133 / 135). Individual Falcon 9 boosters have flown more than 12 times.
So the safe, proven, reliable workhorse of the space industry... Falcon 9.
Only two Falcon 9s have been lost leading to loss of payload. One blew up on the pad, the other broke up in flight. One other launch was considered a partial failure as an engine shut down in flight. NASA was the primary customer and declined a re-ignition. The primary NASA payload was put into the correct orbit, but a secondary payload ended up in the wrong orbit and was lost.
All of these were early models of the Falcon 9. The current block 5 version have a 100% success record.
Contrast this with Ariane. Of the 253 launches of all rockets in the Ariane family only 241 were successful, so only a 95.3% success rate. The Ariane 5 has only had 106 successful launces out of 111.
Of course, some other F9s have been lost during landing, but if you factor this into your statistics, then every other rocket system has a 100% failure rate.
A Smart car is cheaper than a truck. One could move a piano, the other make for an amusing YT video.
Or payloads are more than just mass, so whether it'll fit inside fairings. There was also an issue that SpaceX didn't have facilities or clearance to integrate and launch classified payloads until taxpayers funded that capability.
I think there were also performance differences, ie if the launch needed a fully expended Falcon or Falcon Heavy, the price ends up closer to competitors.
They probably booked the launches years ago when there was still some doubt about SpaceX and are tied into the contracts.
With SpaceX incredible record now though there would have to be a very good reason to launch on anything else. 145 missions and counting. The only incidents were a partial failure on the 4th launch, one in flight failure on the 19th launch and what would have been the 29th launch going boom on the pad.
Since then every flight a success and a very good record at landing the boosters for reuse. The booster used for last weeks Starlink launch landed safely after its 12th mission.
The whole Ariane family has had 253 launches since 1979 and only 241 were successful. SpaceX will pass this total in 3 or 4 years at the current launch rate.
Don't mention hookers. I've been musing about a Mars book. For the 250th anniversary of Mars Founders Day, Martians recover the space car to take pride of place in a new museum. But they discover the reason it missed Mars in the first place was an unexpected 60kg object in it's baggage area.
But then I'd need to wrap a few hundred pages around that meme, and deal with lawyers.
I've not received any email advising of subscription price rises in the UK? Are these price rises not being applied to existing customers, as I've seen suggested elsewhere, or they not applicable in the UK?
Either way, a relatively small price increase makes no difference to me given the lack of any other alternatives where I'm moving. Thankfully my order, placed last year was already fulfilled last month so I won't have to pay the increase hardware cost.
The hardware rise is effective immediately? That is misleading. If you order today you won't receive the hardware until 2023. Just like Tesla, Starlink is doing the right thing by attempting to predict future costs, and then locking in prices for preorders and honoring them.
I ordered a Model X in Feb 2021, but I'm not expecting it until July or later. But Tesla locked in my price and I'll be paying significantly less than someone ordering today, because they would be ordering a car to be delivered in January or later.
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