-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25b (depending on bond length in years 2031,33,36,46 and 2056)
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
SpaceX stock has also dropped below their IPO price. It doesn't change their current financials but it may make it more difficult to raise money in the future.
does low float and high demand drive the price up? the article just says more volatility which makes sense, but over subscribed would make me think it would have a higher price. Everyone is already bailing on their positions?
Starlink should probably reverse course on this however, it's one thing to pay 10k for up to 20 guests on a small private jet vs a company like Delta with a fleet of 747s. Charge Delta 20k, charge this guy 10k.
I don't know who else is launching satellites, but many airlines do offer wifi, often via partnerships with telco companies. It's just expensive and slow.
So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
Also, not everyone in "aviation" is either an airliner or a 20 seat private jet. Joe Piston flying his two seater Cessna that cost him about as much as a new Toyota is not ever going to be paying Starlink's aviation price.
They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.
Joe Piston probably has enough on his plate flying his 2-seater without global 1Gbps entertainment-on-demand or executing trades on his brokerage account while his team of financiers crunch the numbers in row 2.
Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.
Of course a pilot is not going to trading stocks while flying, but there are plenty of safety reasons to have in-cockpit connectivity, including weather, notams, long-range comms with their destination, and so on. Not to mention convenient Internet for a passenger on a long flight, who themselves might want to trade their stocks.
These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.
Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.
That 20 guests on a PJ are probably worth more than a fully booked 747. Price has always been set based how much customers are willing pay, not based on the value it creates.
> He then reviewed my billing history and account details, confirmed that my service address had never actually changed, and determined that nothing had been moved. As a result, he issued a full refund.
Yeah but it still sounds like $1,500 demand fee was not a mistake, charging OP was the mistake.
People first mentioned these fees at like $100... now you can go to Costco, grab a Starlink, and they'll randomly ask for $1,500 to actually start service.
Congestion is a thing when each node needs to go to space, but it also feels like they're cashing in on years of "just move to a cabin in the woods and work off Starlink"... once you've done that they have you by the balls even worse than a typical ISP.
Let me guess... if you put the address into their handy text box, they tell you exactly what the demand surcharge is going to be for that location?
I tried it, and would you look at that, I was right.
I guess if you buy an entire house without checking to see what it costs to get internet service at that location, then you might be in a tough spot. Hard to blame it on anyone else though.
> I guess if you buy an entire house without checking
We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.
Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.
> Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans
This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!
I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!
They're not applying these retroactively. (They did so in the reddit link above, but that was a mistake that they fixed.) The only way you'd have this problem is if you check before you buy, see that it's not there, buy the place, then move in and find out that a surcharge was added in the meantime. That would suck, but I suppose it's a risk you run if you don't lock in your deal ahead of time, and you choose to move somewhere with only one good provider.
If you're privileged enough to work a six-figure tech job while engaging in a homesteader larp in a "cabin in the woods", you can probably afford the fee. So can "off-grid" YouTuber grifters.
It's like everyone feels entitled to something they didn't know existed a few years ago.
People feel entitled to the advertised rate structure. Was there anywhere in the promo material that you might get slapped with $1500 connection fees?
If you are not big tech, that’s a lot of money. For the home in the middle of nowhere, $1500 could be more than you would pay in monthly rent. Plenty of rural people without access to good internet were hoping for Starlink to save them from garbage DSL connection options.
I go to their home page, click "get started," and it asks me where I want service. If I put in a place with a congestion surcharge, then it shows me on the next page. In fact, you have to pay it up front to order service. Seems advertised to me. If you don't want to pay it, then you don't have to use their service.
Boo hoo.... these same people were previously faced with $40,000 connection fees for Comcast and Verizon to trench a cable 1/2 mile to their property so $1500 seems like a pittance.
Look, friends of mine did this, they bought a country place so they can live the dream and write software in the sticks.
Next thing you know they're drilling new wells and installing a generator to support the fantasy while the bills pile up. When you bring modern conveniences to rural life it costs money.
A few days ago people were
telling me the Starlink was brilliant because it gave small African villages with no mains electricity an internet connection to share.
This kind of behaviour does rather dampen the value proposition for such people.
Do you think tech bros who voluntarily choose to live in the woods should pay the same subsidized price as a rural African schoolhouse? Equity and all that.
It doesn't matter what I think in this case (I have already decided to not give Musk any money), what matters here is what Musk thinks and does, and how the actual real market reacts to that.
His address would have received it too, if he was starting new service. It's only for new customers, they're not hitting existing customers with the charge. The error was that putting in the address made it look like he had moved, which counts as new service.
It sounds like this was a bug where slight updates to geolocation data (his address updated its physical location, probably to be more accurate) triggered a "location moved" process. Annoying, but not indicative of a new policy.
They are attempting to juice revenue across all product cohorts, this is simply another datapoint. Customers are captive until there are more connectivity options.
“Juice?”
As in they have the best product by a wide margin and are charging a totally fair price for it that reflects demand.
Nobody flying private cares about the price of Starlink.
It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.
The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.
Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!
SpaceX has a monopoly on high speed satellite internet. They will extract as much as they can from customers with said monopoly until there is a competitor. Doesn't sound like we're talking past each other except perhaps you might be a fan and I am not (specifically, extractionist monopolist behavior).
Don’t think anyone except Peter Thiel and Hasbro will argue that Monopoly is a good thing. ;-)
SpaceX has made the investments/innovation to better-serve the satellite internet market that already had players in it; HughesNet, Viasat, Iridium / Globalstar. Those were the price-gouging Oligopolist incumbents who Starlink is disrupting with a 10x better service for considerably cheaper.
Totally agree that SpaceX doubling the price from $10k/month to $20k looks really bad especially if they’re doing it to existing customers.
But the way I see this (as a non-private-jet-traveler) is: Starlink is doing a “Robin Hood” and making the Rich (who can all easily afford it) pay for the expansion of the service which will benefit all the rest of customers. And if the 0.01% decide to switch to an alternative supplier, that’s good for competition. So in a way it’s anti-monopolist. ;-)
I’m pretty sure rest of starlink customers will get similar treatment in the future. Their potential customer base is limited and it’s only ISP that literately burns their backbone network every few years and has to replace to keep it running.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
it has already gone up in price two times since i got mine. i still happily pay for the convenience and safety of having internet on my campervan in the middle of a national forest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What harm are you worried about coming to in the middle of a national forest that having the internet could possibly save you from? You're in a van, for heaven's sakes. You can roll up the windows, lock the doors, and/or drive off from most dangers save a breakdown or a wildfire, and the internet won't save you from a wildfire.
I've tent camped a lot on forest service land (and BLM land) both out west and in the east. Generally having arrived there by human power. Not once have I been confronted with a situation where the internet would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever.
You really can't think of ANY situations that might be helped with instant communication with the outside world? If that's true, please don't go into national forests or BLMs anymore, I don't want my taxes to be spent looking for your body.
It's more that if you're that far off the beaten path, you'd better be prepared to hunker down and live with any kind of emergency that comes up for several hours up to a couple of days anyway. Which, for the record, is my standard and expectation for myself.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with being eaten by a bear, having a dangerous encounter with another person, or are at risk of being overrun by wildfire or flooding, a phone isn't likely to help much with the next 30 seconds of your possibly soon-to-be-abbreviated life. That's the risk you (and I) take by being out in the woods. You can't mitigate all or even much of that with technology.
I won't suggest that you can't find situation where having Starlink wouldn't be nice, but as another comment suggests: It's increasingly a niche product. Starlink may not be able to survive on being a product that provides internet access for campers and rural populations. That market might not be large enough to sustain the Starlink satellite fleet. There are entire countries where even to most remote areas have at least 2G cell service and fiber is frequently available even out in the country side.
Defence contracts are more likely than anything to be what keeps the satellites in orbit.
also all the flagship phones have emergency satellite connections now, so it's not even the emergency bit, it's just about having full broadband internet
and the hilarious part is if you're along the US-Canadian border (or in most of Maine), you're in this magical 1.9GHz PCS coordination zone that they can't provide T-Satellite service in, and provide basically zero information that that's a thing.
i can think of 1000 reasons to need to call for help. heck, two months ago i fell on my skateboard and shattered my femur at the hip. it sure was nice to be able to call 911 and have someone come pick me up given that i couldn't drive anywhere. my van was parked right at the skatepark and there was no way i was going to drive. obviously not skating in a national park, but it isn't out of the question to not have a major injury in a remote location.
but it isn't just about harm, as i said "convenience". i like being able to download detailed maps for trail hiking on-demand, and being off-grid and still able to be working (as my job requires me to be online).
I would humbly suggest that you are moving the goalposts.
It was implied in your what-if post, i.e. "I fractured my femur in the skate park, but what if I was in a remote location".
You can also get cheap satellite dumb-phones with pay-as-you-go SIM cards. No need to be tied to a Starlink sub if your primary concern is about being able to summon help in an emergency in a remote location. All you need is your location and you can get that from any satellite dumb-phone.
Also with multiple humans there are other options. Unless you are somewhere truly remote, a casual walk a few minutes back down the trail will likely find you some other humans who can assist and summon help.
Stating the obvious but also in a remote location, 911 will not turn up instantly, so people in the group should have suitable training for remote first aid and be prepared to give it for an extended period whilst waiting for 911.
If American infrastructure is in such a bad shape that it requires starlink to make emergency calls, then I think we have bigger problems.
And please, when you go hiking, download and print all the maps you need before you depart, and share a detailed plan with somebody able to call help, including a time estimate where you will make contact.
As for work. Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
> download and print all the maps you need before you depart
If I'm living and traveling in my campervan for months on end, which is something I love to do, having starlink enables me to not have to plan. I can download the maps, hop out of my van and go. That's my own ideal freedom, I'm not tied to planning the same way you are.
> Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
Wow, thanks for the advice. It is wild to me that you've got enough of an ego to say this to someone you don't know.
see below. 911 just saved my life. not even counting the amount of pain i was in. i had internal bleeding and ended up need transfusions due to my red blood cell count dropping below 7.
I also don’t get the convenience part. If you are in a national forest, put on your boots, open the door and go for a walk, breathe the fresh air and touch some grass. Why is a low latency high speed internet connection convenient in this setting, you should be happy to be able to send text messages and make phone calls, as I assume you‘ll be spending most of your time enjoying nature or sitting around the campfire.
Sure, I am glad for you. I‘m sure there are dozens of people in your situation. Now if we can only get a whole constellation of satellites to accommodate every possible niche.
Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.
For any dense populated area, starlink cost explodes exponentially to support customers there, while fiber/5G is linear.
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.
The killer app is military usage, so they just need enough consumer and b2b demand to keep what they charge governments within what they can justify to taxpayers
I think it'd be easier for Starlink to start building and deploying wide area ground stations (like 5g towers or something) to serve urban areas than it would take all the other telcos to deploy satellites.
Why in the world would any MNO or WISP choose satellite backhaul for urban areas when their next tower is presumably only a few kilometres over (as opposed to tens of kilometres in more regional areas)?
They really don't manage the traffic well over terrestrial lines for the globe, that's why starlink, iridium, viasat, even directv have all used satellites. Billions of taxpayer money and even more private funding have been devoted to bringing lines to rural areas and the area covered is still so small.
First, they would need global coverage for that. Because looking at this map tells a different story: https://starlink.com/gb/map
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They must have changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
I noticed this too, but decided to keep my mini because I downgraded my max plan (I was defaulted to this as a customer since they started) to a bitrate I still won't reach, and by doing so am saving $480 per year.
It is an reckless business practice to not have the monthly price locked down, with strong contractual protections. Sounds like Correnti didn't negotiate well and are now finding out.
Agreed with this, and it also doesn't seem like this is the case but I'm generally a fan of charging B2B as high as possible to lower costs for regular consumers - other companies will generally pay a lot more even if it just includes the potential of getting better support, and that profit can be used to give access to more people at a lower price.
A lot of open source software uses this model - free for everyone, but if you're a company that wants support then you have to pay for it, and that covers the development for everyone
The price increased by $10,000 per month. United's 737-800's seat 166 passengers, so assuming each plane has 5 flights per day, that would only make the average ticket about 40 cents more expensive.
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.
Unfortunately, their valuation has almost nothing to do with starlink revenues. It’s almost entirely speculative oribital data centers that have not been invented yet. They could double their starlink revenues and it would have no impact on the valuation.
Might as well base the valuation on SpaceX getting a colony to Alpha Centauri and then billions living there and needing regular SpaceX shuttle services from Sol.
Then we could properly value the IPO in the quadrillions. (I know you know this is ridiculous. But investors clearly are riding high on the tulip mania).
I disagree, but not for the reason you think. They need to fund R&D to justify their high valuation. A new stock issue would decrease the valuation, and they will have a difficult time borrowing the money with their poor bond valuations. So this will (maybe) slow the bleed.
Musk doesn't need to deliver to keep valuation up. We've seen him doing pretty well stringing people along indefinitely with "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" self driving capabilities.
It’s not an opinion it’s laid out clearly in the prospectus. Spacex is not a space company. It is a 2 trillion dollar AI company with a small launch business and a smaller ISP.
In the meantime, until Musk comes up with the next big "idea" to switch to, all the current revenue levers need to be pushed to max to try to make it to that next stage, since public companies demand revenue every quarter.
A lot of their revenue is also from renting out GPUs to more productive AI companies, so depending on how long that game can keep on going (getting access to GPUs before other companies), it could last for a while too.
Here’s an idea: Musk launches a ton of orbital gpus but in reality it’s just an empty shell and real gpus sit in unused grok data centres. How would we even know?
Regulatory problems are doing the heavy lifting. Sure power is "free", if you can launch it, station keep it and cool it and if the data services are useful at the modem latencies of geosync and lunar orbits. But if datacenter projects can't be built/powered fast enough due to permitting, this is an expensive workaround.
Also, the lifetime of the panels on the ground is longer by about the same multiple as the power advantage of going to space, so if you're limited by the size of your photovoltaic factory, there's no reason to go to space.
No planning restrictions. Throw up as many as you can afford to build and launch. No grid strain because they're self-powered.
And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Technologically? Maaaaaybe a slight ping time reduction in certain configurations compared to terrestrial fiber, because even with multiple hops lasers can still be faster than fiber.
Super-expensive, questionably economic way to do it though.
The best I have heard: It makes you fully independent of the terrestrial energy grid. There is also some nebulous freedom from governmental authority possibilities.
Both of which strike me as poor arguments. We are in a short term energy crunch. I expect within five years that most of the energy problems will be resolved and the eye watering financials of launching a GPU into space will look absurd
Governments also do not like to cede authority, so I find it hard to believe that they will not claim jurisdiction over any business operating within their borders (all of those ground stations).
if you launch enough solar panels to power the data center into space, its easier to put them on the ground. Yeah there's some less power, but also have six times the lifespan so just build twice as many and it's still more efficient. Getting land in Texas can't be that hard.
You could build them at the South Pole, or at the bottom of the ocean and it will still be easier than putting them in space. Just think of maintenance.
Oh no, your power supply burned out
Space: Welp, that entire data center node is dead now.
Antarctica: OK, put a technician on a modified C-130.
I think the idea is easy energy availability and no push back from the locals. Those both seem to be to be fairly simple to solve on the ground compared to the unsolved issues doing it in orbit.
It is possible they delayed this rise as they didn't want bad news in the run-up to going public; but the is absolutely no way this can touch their fundamental numbers.
What’s even more concerning is that the current government changed their requirements for the rural broadband program so companies like StarLink can bid to bring internet to those remote areas instead of using wired or fiber connections. Not far-fetched that StarLink wins this contract and then squeezes those customers over time. ISPs will have little reason to expand in those underserved areas without government subsidies.
Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
> Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
When companies buy a service, they normally agree a bespoke contract for 5 years or so and a fixed price for additional units, often with an option of a further x years period too.
So sounds like there wasn't a bespoke contract as lawyers should have picked it up.
The "upcoming" is doing a lot of work. There is not currently a viable alternative to Starlink with the same capability, speed, or latency. Amazon Leo will be the next to go online and it won't be fully operational until sometime in 2028. No one in the aviation industry will want to wait for that.
There is a nuance missed in the discussion so far - Starlink is creating a new product level, differentiating service between continental and intercontinental aviation connectivity. Previously these were a single category.
If you are operating in North America for example, your service is going from $10k to $12.5k. Still a 25% increase, which is not fun, but I think a lot of the customers affected by this will fit into this category. You only need the $20k plan if your aircraft travels between their roughly-continental regions.
Nicholas Air, quoted in the article, appears to have no need for the $20k plan and should not use it.
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
At the end of the day, there's the people who can make a vastly superior product time and time again, and they all like to work with other people who can do the same. They like to be pushed, they love solving hard problems, hate bureaucracy, and will find leaders that can accommodate all that. Elon provides that the same as Steve did.
I agree, though honestly it starts with any of Musk's product presentation events, which, frankly are all absolutely terrible compared to what Jobs would put on.
Musk is good at getting money, he is not good at product design. Jobs had amazing taste, Musk has terrible taste. If Musk has a talent beyond raising money, it can be in making bold management moves, at least that's what I hear from CEOs that admire Musk. But I think in the past five years all the bold choices have not been so fantastic.
Cybertruck was when people started to see that the emperor had no clothes, i think.
Brand-new Cessna planes were selling for roughly 2x the US median annual income in the 1960s. Today that number is at around 5.5x.
I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.
so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.
---
All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.
I am traveling in Europe currently and got a Saily SIM card - 5g coverage is really good and seems to be expanding fast - a small village I visited 2 years ago that had no cell coverage at all I was getting 250mbps download, faster than than the wired internet at most of the places I was visiting. This prompted me to actually look into Starlink speeds and apparently 5g is generally faster than Starlink...
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
Remote areas of USA (and other third world countries when it comes to the communication infrastructure) + companies that operate in remote areas (logistic, resource extraction, etc) + military are main customer base.
There are plenty of super remote areas in Europe as well. Even more in the US, where population is more clustered to population centers
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
Theoretical max speed of 4G/5G are like 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, without going into mmWave. Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans. Looks like it's supposed to reach 1Gbps down with V3 sats, but then again, cellular is like up to 5Gbps yesterday, at least in the spec.
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
Presumably local telecoms would be able to sell it for cheaper? "travel esim" providers like saily are basically paying roaming rates for whatever carrier the customer is physically in, it's definitely not the cheapest price available.
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
You should spend more time out west or midwest in places like: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, North Dakota, or head up to Alaska, etc.
There are a lot of places in and around the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains that have no service.
Note: I know a lot of rural ISPs serving these markets, or that have been trying to for decades - I know precisely when StarLink will work like crap or be great for the customer (given options at all).
A lot of people on this forum actually have investments in SpaceX, directly or indirectly, and they're interested in this stuff as a signal of the health of the company.
I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
As I write this, I'm disputing a charge from Starlink because when I activated mine, they automatically started the free trial for me, but nowhere in the receipt or on their website did they say they would switch me to the most expensive plan after the free trial was over. And they made it extremely confusing to cancel my free trial. So I ended up being charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box. I disputed it twice through Apple Card and it still got rejected, even though I have the invoices. So I'm disputing it a third time, and I know one thing is clear: I am never going to purchase anything that Elon has made ever again. They also lied to me about the cost of keeping the Starlink. Their app said the satellite would need to stay "alive," and to do so I had to pay $5 a month. But then I recently realized that that was also a lie—you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive.
Apple Card aka Goldman Sachs is notoriously bad at handling disputes. They were fined $89 million for mishandling disputes, yet they continue to reject disputes offhand [1]. I no longer use Apple Card other than for Apple Store purchases.
Who's your target audience for this... misinformation?
> charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.
There will be many price increases seeing as:
-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25b (depending on bond length in years 2031,33,36,46 and 2056)
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
So huge amounts needed continuously.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
SpaceX stock has also dropped below their IPO price. It doesn't change their current financials but it may make it more difficult to raise money in the future.
Will be interesting to see if Elon regrets only floating 4% [0] of the company at the IPO and not more seeing as it was over subscribed.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-spcx-stock-free-f...
does low float and high demand drive the price up? the article just says more volatility which makes sense, but over subscribed would make me think it would have a higher price. Everyone is already bailing on their positions?
You missing the point...the 4% that is what caused the artificial scarcity.
Slightly over subscribed would say yes, but vastly over subscribed indicates they went too low?
Yeah, up 50% over 5 days, back down to the starting line over the next 30 isn't a great outlook to my eye.
Holy cow how can they raise over $70B every year for 8 years straight? Who is investing this much?
basically investors interested in long term and see how spacex the only one in game
> spacex the only one in game
But there are many ai companies!
/s, but only kinda
Note that this is for the "aviation plan" which already requires six-digits equipment.
Starlink should probably reverse course on this however, it's one thing to pay 10k for up to 20 guests on a small private jet vs a company like Delta with a fleet of 747s. Charge Delta 20k, charge this guy 10k.
Why would they not charge as much as possible? Who else is launching satellites? He’s got one of the biggest moats I’ve ever seen.
I don't know who else is launching satellites, but many airlines do offer wifi, often via partnerships with telco companies. It's just expensive and slow.
So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
> The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
When it comes to internet, this IS the moat.
Passengers who want en route internet will demand it. The cost won't matter because that will be expensed. They will want the performance.
ASTS - though I think their satellites are supposed to connect to phone hardware
Also, not everyone in "aviation" is either an airliner or a 20 seat private jet. Joe Piston flying his two seater Cessna that cost him about as much as a new Toyota is not ever going to be paying Starlink's aviation price.
They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.
Joe Piston probably has enough on his plate flying his 2-seater without global 1Gbps entertainment-on-demand or executing trades on his brokerage account while his team of financiers crunch the numbers in row 2.
Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.
https://starlink.com/business/aviation?srsltid=AfmBOoqiIuBL1...
Of course a pilot is not going to trading stocks while flying, but there are plenty of safety reasons to have in-cockpit connectivity, including weather, notams, long-range comms with their destination, and so on. Not to mention convenient Internet for a passenger on a long flight, who themselves might want to trade their stocks.
These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.
> Starlink should probably reverse course on this
Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.
That 20 guests on a PJ are probably worth more than a fully booked 747. Price has always been set based how much customers are willing pay, not based on the value it creates.
They also recently doubled the price of the standby plan
Yeah, for regular people they're just starting to suddenly charge $1,500 fees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1uklz4q/starlink_...
> He then reviewed my billing history and account details, confirmed that my service address had never actually changed, and determined that nothing had been moved. As a result, he issued a full refund.
Yeah but it still sounds like $1,500 demand fee was not a mistake, charging OP was the mistake.
People first mentioned these fees at like $100... now you can go to Costco, grab a Starlink, and they'll randomly ask for $1,500 to actually start service.
Congestion is a thing when each node needs to go to space, but it also feels like they're cashing in on years of "just move to a cabin in the woods and work off Starlink"... once you've done that they have you by the balls even worse than a typical ISP.
Isn't this fee specifically before they have you by the balls?
Not unless you had a potential $1500 fee top of mind before you moved...
Wanna guess if Starlink is advertising how insane these fees have gotten?
Let me guess... if you put the address into their handy text box, they tell you exactly what the demand surcharge is going to be for that location?
I tried it, and would you look at that, I was right.
I guess if you buy an entire house without checking to see what it costs to get internet service at that location, then you might be in a tough spot. Hard to blame it on anyone else though.
> I guess if you buy an entire house without checking
We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.
https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/elon-musk-cha...
Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.
> Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans
This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!
I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!
They're not applying these retroactively. (They did so in the reddit link above, but that was a mistake that they fixed.) The only way you'd have this problem is if you check before you buy, see that it's not there, buy the place, then move in and find out that a surcharge was added in the meantime. That would suck, but I suppose it's a risk you run if you don't lock in your deal ahead of time, and you choose to move somewhere with only one good provider.
If you're privileged enough to work a six-figure tech job while engaging in a homesteader larp in a "cabin in the woods", you can probably afford the fee. So can "off-grid" YouTuber grifters.
It's like everyone feels entitled to something they didn't know existed a few years ago.
People feel entitled to the advertised rate structure. Was there anywhere in the promo material that you might get slapped with $1500 connection fees?
If you are not big tech, that’s a lot of money. For the home in the middle of nowhere, $1500 could be more than you would pay in monthly rent. Plenty of rural people without access to good internet were hoping for Starlink to save them from garbage DSL connection options.
I go to their home page, click "get started," and it asks me where I want service. If I put in a place with a congestion surcharge, then it shows me on the next page. In fact, you have to pay it up front to order service. Seems advertised to me. If you don't want to pay it, then you don't have to use their service.
> congestion surcharge
I can't wait until our urban cable-modem and DSL providers pick up those "congestion surcharge" ideas! (FCC tariffs prevent this, right?)
Boo hoo.... these same people were previously faced with $40,000 connection fees for Comcast and Verizon to trench a cable 1/2 mile to their property so $1500 seems like a pittance.
Look, friends of mine did this, they bought a country place so they can live the dream and write software in the sticks.
Next thing you know they're drilling new wells and installing a generator to support the fantasy while the bills pile up. When you bring modern conveniences to rural life it costs money.
So we should let companies do what ever anti-consumer practices they want, because you don't like the group they are doing it to?
Should a car company be allowed to charge you an extra fee every time you have a passenger?
If you need a specialized amphibious vehicle to get to your shack in the woods, it's not anti-consumer if it costs you more than a Mitsubishi Mirage.
A few days ago people were telling me the Starlink was brilliant because it gave small African villages with no mains electricity an internet connection to share.
This kind of behaviour does rather dampen the value proposition for such people.
Do you think tech bros who voluntarily choose to live in the woods should pay the same subsidized price as a rural African schoolhouse? Equity and all that.
It doesn't matter what I think in this case (I have already decided to not give Musk any money), what matters here is what Musk thinks and does, and how the actual real market reacts to that.
The world is more than rich tech bros living in the woods. Normal income people also wanted to use this service without being bankrupted.
Rural homes do have roads that can be reached on a rusty pickup.
So not his service address, but a slightly different latitude/longitude would have received that.
His address would have received it too, if he was starting new service. It's only for new customers, they're not hitting existing customers with the charge. The error was that putting in the address made it look like he had moved, which counts as new service.
It sounds like this was a bug where slight updates to geolocation data (his address updated its physical location, probably to be more accurate) triggered a "location moved" process. Annoying, but not indicative of a new policy.
Furnishing low-latency, broadband connectivity to private aircraft. The Challenger 350 noted in the article stickers north of $10M
For comparison,
If you live in a $300,000 home and pay $100/month for internet you’re paying 0.4% per year for the service.
If you own a $15,000,000 jet and pay $20,000/month for internet you’re paying 1.6% per year for the service.
By this comparison, we might say private jet owners are paying 4x more for their internet on their plane.
They are attempting to juice revenue across all product cohorts, this is simply another datapoint. Customers are captive until there are more connectivity options.
“Juice?” As in they have the best product by a wide margin and are charging a totally fair price for it that reflects demand. Nobody flying private cares about the price of Starlink.
It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.
The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.
Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!
SpaceX has a monopoly on high speed satellite internet. They will extract as much as they can from customers with said monopoly until there is a competitor. Doesn't sound like we're talking past each other except perhaps you might be a fan and I am not (specifically, extractionist monopolist behavior).
Don’t think anyone except Peter Thiel and Hasbro will argue that Monopoly is a good thing. ;-)
SpaceX has made the investments/innovation to better-serve the satellite internet market that already had players in it; HughesNet, Viasat, Iridium / Globalstar. Those were the price-gouging Oligopolist incumbents who Starlink is disrupting with a 10x better service for considerably cheaper.
Totally agree that SpaceX doubling the price from $10k/month to $20k looks really bad especially if they’re doing it to existing customers.
But the way I see this (as a non-private-jet-traveler) is: Starlink is doing a “Robin Hood” and making the Rich (who can all easily afford it) pay for the expansion of the service which will benefit all the rest of customers. And if the 0.01% decide to switch to an alternative supplier, that’s good for competition. So in a way it’s anti-monopolist. ;-)
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I’m pretty sure rest of starlink customers will get similar treatment in the future. Their potential customer base is limited and it’s only ISP that literately burns their backbone network every few years and has to replace to keep it running.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
it has already gone up in price two times since i got mine. i still happily pay for the convenience and safety of having internet on my campervan in the middle of a national forest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What harm are you worried about coming to in the middle of a national forest that having the internet could possibly save you from? You're in a van, for heaven's sakes. You can roll up the windows, lock the doors, and/or drive off from most dangers save a breakdown or a wildfire, and the internet won't save you from a wildfire.
I've tent camped a lot on forest service land (and BLM land) both out west and in the east. Generally having arrived there by human power. Not once have I been confronted with a situation where the internet would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever.
You really can't think of ANY situations that might be helped with instant communication with the outside world? If that's true, please don't go into national forests or BLMs anymore, I don't want my taxes to be spent looking for your body.
It's more that if you're that far off the beaten path, you'd better be prepared to hunker down and live with any kind of emergency that comes up for several hours up to a couple of days anyway. Which, for the record, is my standard and expectation for myself.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with being eaten by a bear, having a dangerous encounter with another person, or are at risk of being overrun by wildfire or flooding, a phone isn't likely to help much with the next 30 seconds of your possibly soon-to-be-abbreviated life. That's the risk you (and I) take by being out in the woods. You can't mitigate all or even much of that with technology.
I won't suggest that you can't find situation where having Starlink wouldn't be nice, but as another comment suggests: It's increasingly a niche product. Starlink may not be able to survive on being a product that provides internet access for campers and rural populations. That market might not be large enough to sustain the Starlink satellite fleet. There are entire countries where even to most remote areas have at least 2G cell service and fiber is frequently available even out in the country side.
Defence contracts are more likely than anything to be what keeps the satellites in orbit.
> It's increasingly a niche product.
I'd argue it is going to go the other way. It is going to find more and more broad usage over time.
also all the flagship phones have emergency satellite connections now, so it's not even the emergency bit, it's just about having full broadband internet
powered by... starlink. https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/satellite-phone-service
Apple's SOS features are going to go to AmazonLEO and are currently globalstar. Google's SOS goes to a geosync orbit. This is some t-mobile feature.
and the hilarious part is if you're along the US-Canadian border (or in most of Maine), you're in this magical 1.9GHz PCS coordination zone that they can't provide T-Satellite service in, and provide basically zero information that that's a thing.
https://i.imgur.com/pagujRS.png
this is a map of the t-satellite coverage from the t-mobile coverage map, just the t-sat layer.
i can think of 1000 reasons to need to call for help. heck, two months ago i fell on my skateboard and shattered my femur at the hip. it sure was nice to be able to call 911 and have someone come pick me up given that i couldn't drive anywhere. my van was parked right at the skatepark and there was no way i was going to drive. obviously not skating in a national park, but it isn't out of the question to not have a major injury in a remote location.
but it isn't just about harm, as i said "convenience". i like being able to download detailed maps for trail hiking on-demand, and being off-grid and still able to be working (as my job requires me to be online).
> obviously not skating in a national park, but it isn't out of the question to not have a major injury in a remote location.
It isn't out of the question to have a major injury in a remote location.
But the fundamental problem would be being on your own in a remote location, not being unable to call 911.
Yes in your skating example, you "only" fell and shattered your femur.
But what if you fell and hit your head or landed and hit your spine ?
Or what if you had a heart attack ?
You would not be in a position to call 911 then, would you.
Being on your own in a remote location is not a risk problem that you can solve with any amount of technology.
> You would not be in a position to call 911 then, would you.
I never said anything about being alone.
> I never said anything about being alone.
I would humbly suggest that you are moving the goalposts.
It was implied in your what-if post, i.e. "I fractured my femur in the skate park, but what if I was in a remote location".
You can also get cheap satellite dumb-phones with pay-as-you-go SIM cards. No need to be tied to a Starlink sub if your primary concern is about being able to summon help in an emergency in a remote location. All you need is your location and you can get that from any satellite dumb-phone.
Also with multiple humans there are other options. Unless you are somewhere truly remote, a casual walk a few minutes back down the trail will likely find you some other humans who can assist and summon help.
Stating the obvious but also in a remote location, 911 will not turn up instantly, so people in the group should have suitable training for remote first aid and be prepared to give it for an extended period whilst waiting for 911.
Now you're just nitpicking to try to prove some point about calling 911?
If American infrastructure is in such a bad shape that it requires starlink to make emergency calls, then I think we have bigger problems.
And please, when you go hiking, download and print all the maps you need before you depart, and share a detailed plan with somebody able to call help, including a time estimate where you will make contact.
As for work. Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
> download and print all the maps you need before you depart
If I'm living and traveling in my campervan for months on end, which is something I love to do, having starlink enables me to not have to plan. I can download the maps, hop out of my van and go. That's my own ideal freedom, I'm not tied to planning the same way you are.
> Please just take time off and take a proper vacation. By being constantly on call you will burn out at a much faster rate.
Wow, thanks for the advice. It is wild to me that you've got enough of an ego to say this to someone you don't know.
Same. I also have never been confronted with a situation where 911 would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever. Why does 911 even exist?
> Why does 911 even exist?
Because liquor stores get robbed sometimes, but they aren't usually found in the middle of a national forest.
see below. 911 just saved my life. not even counting the amount of pain i was in. i had internal bleeding and ended up need transfusions due to my red blood cell count dropping below 7.
Sorry, that didn't happen to me directly, doesn't count
I also don’t get the convenience part. If you are in a national forest, put on your boots, open the door and go for a walk, breathe the fresh air and touch some grass. Why is a low latency high speed internet connection convenient in this setting, you should be happy to be able to send text messages and make phone calls, as I assume you‘ll be spending most of your time enjoying nature or sitting around the campfire.
i'm in a campervan... i can be off-grid for many weeks and i also have a $dayjob.
starlink enables me to get the best of both worlds, which is a huge reason why i love it so much. don't knock it until you try it. =)
Sure, I am glad for you. I‘m sure there are dozens of people in your situation. Now if we can only get a whole constellation of satellites to accommodate every possible niche.
Now your bias becomes clear. Should have stated that in the first place.
My bias is that I don‘t belong to a tiny minority of people who willingly enter a weird niche that has extreme accommodations.
I think you can safely assume that everyone on this thread excluding you shares my bias.
At some point, everyone becomes price-sensitive.
"everyone" seems like a stretch of imagination. i'm not rich, but i'd still pay 2x (the amount mentioned) what i'm paying now.
So you are two more 2x increases from cancelling? :D
comment edited from one 2x increase, because math and language are hard.
Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.
For any dense populated area, starlink cost explodes exponentially to support customers there, while fiber/5G is linear.
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.
Yes, but the primary reason for Starlink is for areas with poor traditional ISPs.
If you had a choice between Fiber or Starlink, you’d choose Fiber.
So as traditional ISPs improve service and coverage, Starlink becomes less in demand.
The killer app is military usage, so they just need enough consumer and b2b demand to keep what they charge governments within what they can justify to taxpayers
Which militaries are you thinking and how much do you anticipate them spending and/or being willing to try and justify?
Sounds like a great long-term investment.
Starlink would only make sense if the world was not getting more and more concentrated around densely populated areas.
I think it'd be easier for Starlink to start building and deploying wide area ground stations (like 5g towers or something) to serve urban areas than it would take all the other telcos to deploy satellites.
Why in the world would any MNO or WISP choose satellite backhaul for urban areas when their next tower is presumably only a few kilometres over (as opposed to tens of kilometres in more regional areas)?
I don't know, that's an interesting, albeit unrelated question. Do you have an answer?
Why are the satellites required at all?
Telcos manage many multiples of Starlink's traffic just fine over terrestrial high-bandwidth optic fiber.
They really don't manage the traffic well over terrestrial lines for the globe, that's why starlink, iridium, viasat, even directv have all used satellites. Billions of taxpayer money and even more private funding have been devoted to bringing lines to rural areas and the area covered is still so small.
Areas where Starlink makes sense are usually the same areas where people experience economic troubles: rural areas.
Starlink has excellent military applications. The consumer business is a dishonest joke to fool investors.
First, they would need global coverage for that. Because looking at this map tells a different story: https://starlink.com/gb/map
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
At some point in next decade they can literally be the biggest ISP by far, insane potential always. It's all about how long it takes to get there
if you're in a city (where most people live) it'll never be cheaper to get this than fiber
Tell that to the Ukrainians and Syrians.
At the other end they recently doubled the cost of the Starlink Mini standby plan, from $60 to $120 per year.
I have a Starlink v2 dish and I pay $10 per month for a residential "standby" plan.
I only get 10G per month of bandwidth but I rarely use it since I have a fiber connection that is mostly reliable.
It might be a grandfathered plan because they don't list it anywhere I can see:
Edit: turns out this is a feature/mode and not a plan:https://starlink.com/na/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They must have changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
> At the other end they recently doubled the cost of the Starlink Mini standby plan, from $60 to $120 per year.
I kinda wanted to get one of those for standby, but the price seemed too good to be true, so I figured they'd either eliminate it or raise the price.
I noticed this too, but decided to keep my mini because I downgraded my max plan (I was defaulted to this as a customer since they started) to a bitrate I still won't reach, and by doing so am saving $480 per year.
It is an reckless business practice to not have the monthly price locked down, with strong contractual protections. Sounds like Correnti didn't negotiate well and are now finding out.
Agreed with this, and it also doesn't seem like this is the case but I'm generally a fan of charging B2B as high as possible to lower costs for regular consumers - other companies will generally pay a lot more even if it just includes the potential of getting better support, and that profit can be used to give access to more people at a lower price.
A lot of open source software uses this model - free for everyone, but if you're a company that wants support then you have to pay for it, and that covers the development for everyone
The aviation pricing will be passed to consumers either way, as increased fares or in-flight fees.
The price increased by $10,000 per month. United's 737-800's seat 166 passengers, so assuming each plane has 5 flights per day, that would only make the average ticket about 40 cents more expensive.
> Sounds like Correnti didn't negotiate well
Are you sure this is negotiable?
Everything is potentially negotiable.
Price on things like kitchen appliances, furniture often negotiable - you just have to ask.
My wife: (good customer) if I guy two pairs of shoes I want 2nd pair at 50% - them "ok"
My wife: what will you give me if I buy this (expensive briefcase)? - them "$100 gift card"
I got an extra $150 of a sheepskin coat at a going out of business sale just by asking
If price protection for something like this isn't negotiable it's a huge business risk, which would also be reckless to take on.
This stinks.
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.
Hard to not look at the crazy valuation of SpaceX and not see a correlation. At some point, something's gotta give.
Unfortunately, their valuation has almost nothing to do with starlink revenues. It’s almost entirely speculative oribital data centers that have not been invented yet. They could double their starlink revenues and it would have no impact on the valuation.
Might as well base the valuation on SpaceX getting a colony to Alpha Centauri and then billions living there and needing regular SpaceX shuttle services from Sol.
Then we could properly value the IPO in the quadrillions. (I know you know this is ridiculous. But investors clearly are riding high on the tulip mania).
I disagree, but not for the reason you think. They need to fund R&D to justify their high valuation. A new stock issue would decrease the valuation, and they will have a difficult time borrowing the money with their poor bond valuations. So this will (maybe) slow the bleed.
Musk doesn't need to deliver to keep valuation up. We've seen him doing pretty well stringing people along indefinitely with "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" self driving capabilities.
It’s not an opinion it’s laid out clearly in the prospectus. Spacex is not a space company. It is a 2 trillion dollar AI company with a small launch business and a smaller ISP.
I am not disagreeing with that. I am saying that having enough revenue is necessary to keep the house of cards standing.
In the meantime, until Musk comes up with the next big "idea" to switch to, all the current revenue levers need to be pushed to max to try to make it to that next stage, since public companies demand revenue every quarter.
A lot of their revenue is also from renting out GPUs to more productive AI companies, so depending on how long that game can keep on going (getting access to GPUs before other companies), it could last for a while too.
Here’s an idea: Musk launches a ton of orbital gpus but in reality it’s just an empty shell and real gpus sit in unused grok data centres. How would we even know?
That's actually the best take I've heard. It's like Amazon faking-it-till-they-didnt-make it with cashierless grocery stores.
Wasn't it Jeff Skilling who once waxed poetical about hypothetical future value?
Even if invented, what is the advantage of orbit data centers?
Regulatory problems are doing the heavy lifting. Sure power is "free", if you can launch it, station keep it and cool it and if the data services are useful at the modem latencies of geosync and lunar orbits. But if datacenter projects can't be built/powered fast enough due to permitting, this is an expensive workaround.
The orbits are lower than that. Not that it changes the point.
Also, the lifetime of the panels on the ground is longer by about the same multiple as the power advantage of going to space, so if you're limited by the size of your photovoltaic factory, there's no reason to go to space.
No planning restrictions. Throw up as many as you can afford to build and launch. No grid strain because they're self-powered.
And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Technologically? Maaaaaybe a slight ping time reduction in certain configurations compared to terrestrial fiber, because even with multiple hops lasers can still be faster than fiber.
Super-expensive, questionably economic way to do it though.
Why cant we have self powered DC's on earth?
> And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Means also no protection from foreign actors.
No national jurisdiction is a two-edged sword
The best I have heard: It makes you fully independent of the terrestrial energy grid. There is also some nebulous freedom from governmental authority possibilities.
Both of which strike me as poor arguments. We are in a short term energy crunch. I expect within five years that most of the energy problems will be resolved and the eye watering financials of launching a GPU into space will look absurd
Governments also do not like to cede authority, so I find it hard to believe that they will not claim jurisdiction over any business operating within their borders (all of those ground stations).
if you launch enough solar panels to power the data center into space, its easier to put them on the ground. Yeah there's some less power, but also have six times the lifespan so just build twice as many and it's still more efficient. Getting land in Texas can't be that hard.
You could build them at the South Pole, or at the bottom of the ocean and it will still be easier than putting them in space. Just think of maintenance.
Oh no, your power supply burned out Space: Welp, that entire data center node is dead now. Antarctica: OK, put a technician on a modified C-130.
I think the idea is easy energy availability and no push back from the locals. Those both seem to be to be fairly simple to solve on the ground compared to the unsolved issues doing it in orbit.
The Laws of Physics are much easier to build around than the Laws of Men.
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It is possible they delayed this rise as they didn't want bad news in the run-up to going public; but the is absolutely no way this can touch their fundamental numbers.
What’s even more concerning is that the current government changed their requirements for the rural broadband program so companies like StarLink can bid to bring internet to those remote areas instead of using wired or fiber connections. Not far-fetched that StarLink wins this contract and then squeezes those customers over time. ISPs will have little reason to expand in those underserved areas without government subsidies.
Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
I'd see this as an opportunity.
> Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
When companies buy a service, they normally agree a bespoke contract for 5 years or so and a fixed price for additional units, often with an option of a further x years period too.
So sounds like there wasn't a bespoke contract as lawyers should have picked it up.
The "upcoming" is doing a lot of work. There is not currently a viable alternative to Starlink with the same capability, speed, or latency. Amazon Leo will be the next to go online and it won't be fully operational until sometime in 2028. No one in the aviation industry will want to wait for that.
There is a nuance missed in the discussion so far - Starlink is creating a new product level, differentiating service between continental and intercontinental aviation connectivity. Previously these were a single category.
If you are operating in North America for example, your service is going from $10k to $12.5k. Still a 25% increase, which is not fun, but I think a lot of the customers affected by this will fit into this category. You only need the $20k plan if your aircraft travels between their roughly-continental regions.
Nicholas Air, quoted in the article, appears to have no need for the $20k plan and should not use it.
So private jets can no longer offer high speed internet to their customers. That’s so sad.
This is so par for the course for Elon's companies.
He will extract as much as possible, whenever possible.
And he will tell you beforehand, in clear manifestos, why and how it fits the mission.
He’s like the God. Always needs more money!
Gotta pay the massive coupons on SpaceX's bonds, whose yields are heading towards junk territory:
https://www.ft.com/content/3a023b95-66c3-41e1-b0ce-df752a499...
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
At the end of the day, there's the people who can make a vastly superior product time and time again, and they all like to work with other people who can do the same. They like to be pushed, they love solving hard problems, hate bureaucracy, and will find leaders that can accommodate all that. Elon provides that the same as Steve did.
> people who can make a vastly superior product time and time again, and they all like to work with other people who can do the same
These parts are likely pushing the best minds away from Musk these days. Not sure when that turned, perhaps Cybertruck?
I agree, though honestly it starts with any of Musk's product presentation events, which, frankly are all absolutely terrible compared to what Jobs would put on.
Musk is good at getting money, he is not good at product design. Jobs had amazing taste, Musk has terrible taste. If Musk has a talent beyond raising money, it can be in making bold management moves, at least that's what I hear from CEOs that admire Musk. But I think in the past five years all the bold choices have not been so fantastic.
Cybertruck was when people started to see that the emperor had no clothes, i think.
Blue Origin's Terawave [1] can't come soon enough.
[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave
What we need is a public service constellation, not more billonaire ones.
>SpaceX has also increased the price of its Starlink Aviation equipment to $200,000 per business aircraft, up from $145,000 last year.
ouch.
I wonder how this compares with non-starlink aircraft ISP? Was/Is Delta using something else? Their internet has been good for a while.
Won't someone think of the aviators!!
Brand-new Cessna planes were selling for roughly 2x the US median annual income in the 1960s. Today that number is at around 5.5x.
I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.
so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.
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All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.
You don't get to be all of the USA's GDP without a buck or two more per month, you know?
I am traveling in Europe currently and got a Saily SIM card - 5g coverage is really good and seems to be expanding fast - a small village I visited 2 years ago that had no cell coverage at all I was getting 250mbps download, faster than than the wired internet at most of the places I was visiting. This prompted me to actually look into Starlink speeds and apparently 5g is generally faster than Starlink...
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
Remote areas of USA (and other third world countries when it comes to the communication infrastructure) + companies that operate in remote areas (logistic, resource extraction, etc) + military are main customer base.
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There are plenty of super remote areas in Europe as well. Even more in the US, where population is more clustered to population centers
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
Theoretical max speed of 4G/5G are like 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, without going into mmWave. Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans. Looks like it's supposed to reach 1Gbps down with V3 sats, but then again, cellular is like up to 5Gbps yesterday, at least in the spec.
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
Just look at the price and you see it’s for those without other alternatives
Presumably local telecoms would be able to sell it for cheaper? "travel esim" providers like saily are basically paying roaming rates for whatever carrier the customer is physically in, it's definitely not the cheapest price available.
> but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
TBF that's like 70% of the US, large parts of the Southern Hemisphere in general, much of China, India, Russia, etc.
But yes, StarLink is best when it has some user density but not too much user density. It will be this way until... probably forever.
If I go camping? StarLink. Otherwise no cell/internet service.
70% seems a little extreme? Here is a helpful mobile coverage map: https://www.fcc.gov/BroadbandData/MobileMaps/mobile-map
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
You should spend more time out west or midwest in places like: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, North Dakota, or head up to Alaska, etc.
There are a lot of places in and around the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains that have no service.
Note: I know a lot of rural ISPs serving these markets, or that have been trying to for decades - I know precisely when StarLink will work like crap or be great for the customer (given options at all).
isn't Amazon LEO now available or very soon at $60/month?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmazonLeo/comments/1uupd3w
will they offer aviation suitable plans?
Won’t somebody please think of the luxury private aviation consumers?
A lot of people on this forum actually have investments in SpaceX, directly or indirectly, and they're interested in this stuff as a signal of the health of the company.
Not everything has to be some little gripefest.
I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
Won’t somebody please think of the poor SpaceX shareholders? (Not that the article was framed that way.)
Huh? Having an interest in something is not the same as seeking sympathy.
lol what a complainer you are
Rich people are screwing over the slightly less rich, get out the silver pitchforks.
I don't think spacex is rolling in cash. Their valuation has little bearing on cash reserves until they sell.
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As I write this, I'm disputing a charge from Starlink because when I activated mine, they automatically started the free trial for me, but nowhere in the receipt or on their website did they say they would switch me to the most expensive plan after the free trial was over. And they made it extremely confusing to cancel my free trial. So I ended up being charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box. I disputed it twice through Apple Card and it still got rejected, even though I have the invoices. So I'm disputing it a third time, and I know one thing is clear: I am never going to purchase anything that Elon has made ever again. They also lied to me about the cost of keeping the Starlink. Their app said the satellite would need to stay "alive," and to do so I had to pay $5 a month. But then I recently realized that that was also a lie—you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive.
Apple Card aka Goldman Sachs is notoriously bad at handling disputes. They were fined $89 million for mishandling disputes, yet they continue to reject disputes offhand [1]. I no longer use Apple Card other than for Apple Store purchases.
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/archive/newsroom/cfpb-orders...
As a matter of personal policy I never sign up for free trials, for just this sort of reason.
Who's your target audience for this... misinformation? > charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.
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Surprise, surprise, surprise. Well, well well. The honeymoon is over. It's just so predictable.