Imagine paying for data caps for home internet.
No thank you. I’d take DSL over that if I was rural
I live in a rural area. We were thinking about starlink a few years ago, then fiber came to our area. Thank goodness. We’ve literally had no issues, speeds are amazing, and no price hikes.
Fibre is racist and woke, that’s what tramp said at least.
Given his steady diet of hamberders, I’m sure he does think fiber is woke
He love the uneducated.
I’m super jealous. I’m out here in Western Maryland and I’d be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.
Ah, so this is why Elon wanted the rural broadband bill killed.
Why provide a public service when some capitalist can squeeze every penny from that same service?
Well, we’ll provide the service once we buy it from them because they ran it into the ground as a vulture capital operation, and then once we’ve invested a trillion taxpayer dollars into fixing it up, we’ll sell it back to them for pennies.
It’s got to work this time!
Not even a flat rate for that money
im not gonna lie. I halluecenated. and thought the title said “let them eat shit”
seems appropriate, still
I’m one of those people for who Starlink very much is the only option. I moved from Northern Virginia to Western Maryland. This land used to be state park and all it has is electricity and mail delivery. No water, no sewage, no telephone, no internet other than cell hotspot or Starlink. It sucks but I have to try and separate my distaste for Musk with the engineers and people who actually run Starlink day to day, because at the end of the day the service is pretty damn good. The only issue I have (besides the price) is with VoIP traffic; but SIP acts fucky even with Cat5/6 sometimes so idk. I looked up the current policy and at least in the US they do not have a soft data cap. They did when the service initially launched AFAIK but that’s been replaced with a more general “network management” policy (throttling, etc) . https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90?regionCode=US
Just gonna let you know, if ya have 5g available more specifically T-Mobile then ya can get an at home 5g router. It is most definitely cheaper and may have lower latency, though I don’t know how their network is on the East coast furthest east I’ve gone is Utah.
T Mobile is amazing on the east coast.
I often find situations where I have service when my partner in Verizon does not.
I really miss t-mob from living in northern virginia. I’m up in the Appalachian mountains tucked between two peaks. There was a plan at one time to utilize the old 800mhz band for some sort of municipal internet (since 800mhz can either punch through the rock or “ride” along the earth, been too long since RF school to remember). But as far as I know nothing ever came of it.
Unfortunately we only get AT&T and maybe a whiff of T-Mobile once in a blue moon. Gotta go a few miles into town to get reliable service, especially if you want 5G. Thanks though.
So this is what I did for a long time at my folks place out in the boonies.
- Get yourself another line with unlimited data.
- Buy yourself one of these: GL.iNet GL-MT3000 or GL.iNet GL-AX1800
- Connect the phone to the USB slot.
- Turn on the phone’s USB tethering option.
- Go into the router’s admin page and tell it to use USB tethering as the WAN option.
I do this with the same router when there are internet outages (thanks Cablevision).
It works great to get everyone in the house happy.
Hows that work if there is no signal?
OP states the get AT&T signal. You live out in the country, you have to get creative. Find the spot where signal is strong, plop your phone there. Mine at the time hung in front of a window.
Unfortunately, for me the spot where the signal is strong is ~250 feet up on top of a mountain. We had a cell booster that worked great on 3G but I’m not real keen on spending another $150 on a new repeater that may or may not pick up a signal from our roof. Another fun aspect of being out in the country is that I’m living in a converted pole barn which has a metal “skin” with double layer mylar foil/foam insulation that makes it quite difficult for signals to get inside. There’s no mesh so it’s not a full Faraday cage but it creates a lot of attenuation.
The AT&T hotspot is actually data capped, higher ping, and quite slow since we only have HSPA+ (4G) way out here. We used a hotspot while we were on the wait list for Starlink and just knowing there was a data cap made it pretty unpleasant to use. I should have specified that in the original post.
We’re having a pretty nasty thunderstorm right now and it barely misses a beat. I swear I’m not a musk shill lol, I just remember 3G hotspots and how much worse this would have been.
Also don’t hack me plz
Yep, Starlink is the only internet that works out here. In WV, can confirm.
You get what you fucking deserve when you lie down with vermin like Musk. Fuck this space-based nazi isp.
These are the prices and data I see. I currently have the $10 plan.
I think I found the answer. When I checked Starlink’s site, those prices plans match up with the personal plans, but it appears that the user in the screenshot has a business plan.
Screenshots should be the Business Local Priority & Global Priority pricing respectively. My prices might be different than the original screenshot (I’m in Canada and I’m not sure how they localize pricing), but the data amounts seems to line up with the selections in the screenshot.
I wouldn’t use this service unless I literally had no other option. But sadly “no other option” is why they are able to jack up the prices and change the terms and conditions as they feel like with impunity.
What’s worse is, because it’s an option. The work that was being done for other reliable works will be put on indefinite hold. Musk monopolized our orbit. He needs to be brought before an effective tribunal and have his decision scrutinized harshly. I know, I know. “But he won’t”. If everyone had that attitude we would still be riding horses so help or shut up.
Yup, were i live it’s not even that rural but I only have 1 option and it’s basically double the price it should be if I was in a competitive market… 300 down 30 up for $100.
I am unsurprised. I thought it would take longer for it to become outrageously priced, but here we are. this specific pricing is extra crazy IMO.
In any case, I scoffed at the pricing when it was almost reasonable during their trial phases… Back then IIRC it was like $100-150 usd/mo. or something… That’s too much for me already. Seems like they’ve previously increased it to around $200-300 and now they’ve lost their damn minds.
Star link was never economically sensible, price hikes were inevitable. There’s just too few people in their target audience and too many satellites that are simply too costly to maintain at the levels they previously had. I hoped, for the sake of anyone who required starlink for a reasonable Internet connection speed, that the business plans and corporate users would shoulder most of the cost, but here we are.
I think it’s between $120 a month for home use and $165 a month for RV / travel use.
The former $240/mo was not outrageous to begin with?…
These Elon fanboys just love getting scammed by him. I can almost hear the little pay piggies squealing now.
I looked into Starlink years ago when I was RVing. It came out to over $600 up front in equipment costs, THEN $240 a month or w/e. And it’s not like Elon wasn’t a piece of shit back then, either. $50 a month for T-Mobile “5G at home” with no upfront or hidden costs did the trick nicely and bridged the gap until I found a place with cheap fiber. Now I have 2.5Gbps up and down and it’s still less than half the price of Starlink before this price hike.
It’s worth it.
If you’re in the middle of the Pacific often.
Yeah, but the 5000 people that applies to can’t afford the entire network.
I’ve heard it also works well to put pressure on rural Alaskan GCI (the scam that is 0.25¢/GB).
Starlink makes sense for the scenario it was designed fill the gap for. A lack of any other terrestrial options.
Legacy satellite has always been terrible, but the only option in many rural areas, and obviously the middle of nowhere. Starlink is an insanely reliable and decent deal in most of those circumstances. That’s it’s bread and butter.
But if you have literally any other option, it’s usually not the best choice, it’s not meant to be the best choice, it’s intended for use where it’s likely the only choice.
One of my brothers is in Alaska right now. It’s wild to me that he even gets internet where he’s at. Where he’s at they don’t even have mailboxes just PO Boxes.
He is sharing 1TB a month among ~60 people tho
Like it or not, it’s the only option for high speed internet for large swaths of the world. ViaSat is the only competitor and they’re even worse: slower, unusably high latency and ridiculously low data caps.
I cant speak for other countries, but in the US, we are spending hundreds of dollars a month per household in these areas to the richest man in the world for shitty internet service instead of EITHER holding ISPs to the contracts they agreed to when municipalities gave then the right to build without competition from public services for which they were meant to supply high speed wired services to everyone, OR throw those contracts away and build reliable and profitable public services anyway and fuck the useless ISPs over. Instead we are just inviting in another ISP to fill the gap, this one also a racist fascist who is littering space with unregulated junk.
But for those large parts of the world, 240 USD per month is even more ridiculous
I haven’t looked at the FCC map but I bet Starlink takes Last Mile credit for everywhere.
So every tax payer pays Starlink plus tax payers that are their customers pay Starlink a second time with these high prices.
I know one guy where he’s just on a damn mountain. Not many other options.
Not saying it’s the option I’d take, just saying. If you’re in the sticks in a red state…
Yeah there are always exceptions of course. I’ve seen some in that position able to get away with direct line-of-sight connections for a reasonable rate, but it depends heavily on the layout of the surrounding mountains and location of the service provider plus you have to shell out for an antennae or dish. For any wondering, that’s almost always cheaper than the Starlink sign up costs.
Then again, if internet is important to someone, gotta consider if mountain-side living is the right choice to begin with. I’m sure your acquaintance has his reasons though!
I thought starlink was just an alibi company to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, and make SpaceX appear profitable on paper?
Starlink is owned by spaceX so they’ve never purchased a rocket, they just launch
And because of starlink SpaceX will be an insanely profitable company. Starlink is already bankrolling the very expensive starship development.
Who’s bankrolling starlink?
With xAI buying twitter and Tesla buying solarcity, Musk seems like he’s playing the walnut/pea game.
The original goal was that Starlink would be SpaceX’s cash cow. The demand for rocket launches is growing, but it can only grow so fast. If you’ve built the capability to launch so many satellites that you can’t find enough customers for all your launches, one option is to simply find ways to launch your own revenue-generating payloads into orbit. That was the original goal of Starlink, though it seems to be failing at that goal.
You are 100% correct except for
though it seems to be failing at that goal.
Starlink is expected to bring in 2 billion In profit this year, it is successful https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growing-rapidly-as-it-faces-a-moment-of-promise-and-peril/
And they basically destroyed the business model of all other spacecraft manufacturers, which relied heavily on the geostationary telecom market.
Starlink is bankrolling starlink, it’s expected to generate 12 billion In revenue this year with 2 billion of that being profit
Before it paid for itself spacex did and still does have a lot of very wealthy private investors willing to throw significant funds at the company
Then what, are you going to tell us next that going to Mars also was? Come on! /s
Leopards ate his… internet?
Damn, maybe you should move to a radical leftist city where fiber internet is $50 a month.
Try 10€.
Where?
Romania probably.
They went hard on fiber investments a decade or two ago and now they have some of the world’s best internet.
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
Best place in the world to acquire porn: it’s made there (farm to table), and you can download it nigh instantly
Do they have porn markets like farmer markets?
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
then it would be €1200 for a TB (assuming the price goes up linearly), so not cheaper than starlink
10 Gbit as in speed, not data cap. In Europe (at least in most places afaik) we don’t have data caps on fiber.
So no, not even close.Then you should write Gbit/s or Gbps, not just Gbit
Also I live in Europe and my internet is capped at 50 GB and the max speed is 30 Mbps, so 10 Gbps is baffling to me.
Also in Europe (Germany). A cap to home Internet is kinda crazy to me. I don’t measure my usage, but when I did, I usually used about 2-3tb per month.
I have 1gbps down/300mbps up for 50€. Price is shit compared to other parts of Europe, but I can live with it.
I think you’re misreading that as “10 GB of data,” when it’s actually download speeds of 10Gb/s. I looked it up, and there doesn’t seem to be a data cap.
So it’s quite a bit cheaper than Starlink.
I’m not misreading. The comment clearly says 10 Gbit, not 10 Gb/s
While you are technically correct, gigabit almost universally refers to speeds, and not size. You can probably blame the ISPs for that, since they love to advertise “gigabit service” and drop the bit about “per second.”
We pay 4.58€ for 1gbit/1gbit fiber in our condo association in Sweden…
If only I could immigrate. Know any single swedes looking for a spouse?
Whatcha got to offer? Gotta sweeten that pot, or you’ll lose to other bidders.
how is this better? the twitter guy is ordering a TB not a GB
That gigabit per second, without any datacap.
Twitter guy is ordering 1000 gigabyte worth of data, or slightly over 2 hours of internet in Sweden at full speed.
why is everyone dropping the “per second” part
Because gigabytes (GB) are units of storage capacity, and gigabits (Gb) are units of data transfer rate.
It’s implied it’s gigabits per second, as no one ever really measures it in like… Gigabits per hour, or year.
Flat fee of ~€70 to connect and then free for as long as I live in this apartment. 1000/1000 speeds as well, pretty sick honestly
13-18€ for 1gig/1gig in Copenhagen is the going rate
Sad German noises :/
40€ for 250M over cable here. At least I don’t have issues with congestion/slowdown in the evening, which is a common downside of cable.
Sad German noises, never mind those, sad USA noises because yours is still better than ours.
Us lucky fiber users, I can get 8gig symmetrical for $300 and 2 gig for $75 a month. Still nothing like other non American countries but damn do I have it good for living here.
I only have this to say: Fuck the sky pollution. Starlink has been ruining stargazing and star photography and Elon lied about its impact. He claimed they would be invisible with his amazing paint but they’re still visible and fuck it up for people who enjoy watching the stars.
I see them all the time without a camera. They are bright as the stars when they pass over.
pros and cons…
pros:
- internet in remote places
cons:
- at the cost of literallt everything else
If you think ruining stargazing is the biggest problem, don’t look up Satellite Collision Cascades
The fucking muskrat is going to lock us down to Earth and make launches too dangerous due to debris fields
And all of you are just complaining about artificial light
Well I don’t see myself going to space any time soon. But I do see myself watching the nightsky a lot.
You’re right though. It’s another thing he doesn’t care about.
It’s important that we think of future generations, statistically this cascade could easily happen in our lifetimes
They are low enough that it’d probably fix itself over time. It’d be a big problem, but I feel comming generations have bigger ones.
Ok well I have aerospace engineering friends that disagree, and if those quiet mousy guys are panicking then I think they may be on to something
Oh, I mean, it would be bad, even if it “just” meant no/unsafe launches and no LEO for X months/years. I just kinda feels it pales compared to the climate related problems coming generations are likely to face.
… an ablative cascade would destroy nearly every satellite and would render ALL launches russian roulette with 5 chambers filled, and it would last for centuries.
I really have no idea where you are getting your numbers from but there’s ALREADY enough high velocity mass to make LEO a minefield for generations and we’re not stopping launching.
Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit and deorbit naturally after a few years because of the small amounts of escaping atmosphere slowing them down. A collision cascade can’t really happen because it’s a fundamentally decaying orbit.
At least, there’s no risk of lasting orbital debris, at the cost of the satellites having a much shorter lifespan.
I have aerospace engineering friends that disagree, but I’m sure your wikipedia university degree is useful somewhere
Ablative cascades have more than enough energy to kick debris fields up orbit as impact velocities can hit 10 kilometers a second
JSYK that kind of energy can punch a paint flake through a quarter inch of titanium
… Well, fortunately, I don’t manage satellite deployments, but your friends are welcome to tell NASA that their aerospace engineers are actually wrong and need to stop SpaceX before they ground humanity. I’m sure they would love to hear it.
The fucking NASA scientist that came up with this scenario is Donald Kessler, it is literally named after him
They have been warning about this since before you were born.
Why are you so fundamentally resistant to truth?
Really playing to your username, eh. I am familiar with Kessler Syndrome. You’ll note that the most important aspect of said event, is the height, at which objects orbit, as that determines how long it takes for it to deorbit. The level of risk declines precipitously the closer to the earth the orbit is, and even if there was a catastrophic cascade at the height Starlink orbits, it would clear after a few years at most.
Impact ejection can cause eccentric orbits, but at that height, those deorbit even faster.
Fortunately, the very clever scientists at NASA have long since determined that there is essentially no risk from Starlink and similar satellite constellations, because they’ve been paying attention to this since before I was born.
Fortunately, the very clever scientists at NASA have long since determined that there is essentially no risk from Starlink and similar satellite constellations,
That is patently not true to the point that it is effectively a lie
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nasa-starlink-warning
This entire discussion you have been intellectually dishonest and using propaganda talking points. You are no longer welcome on my internet.
