These are the prices and data I see. I currently have the $10 plan.
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.
I’m super jealous. I’m out here in Western Maryland and I’d be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.
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
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) as far as I can tell. https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90?regionCode=US
Yep, Starlink is the only internet that works out here. In WV, can confirm.
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.
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.
- 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.
This kind of shit would have been surprising to me 15 years ago, but today it’s just, how it fucking is, and I hate it.
Oof, my current data consumption for the past 30 days is 1.2 TB on buttery smooth 1Gb fiber. I can’t imagine being bound to 500 GB like is the 2007 dark ages.
What I think is crazy: at your 1 gigabit per second speed, if you use your full speed for only 3 hours you will go over your data limit. For the month.
I haven’t thought about a data cap in years once I was lucky enough to get fiber in my house.
Same as you: symmetrical 1gbps up and down, baby.
Starlink is out again. I figured this is how it would end up.
And this is why capitalism utterly sucks at providing public services.
It’s not really capitalism anymore if the CEO runs the government too.
Idk what else the USA has to do to show the obvious oligarchy y’all have.
Even if the politicos unironically started referring to themselves as oligarchs, a significant population of US citizens would likely either take it as a joke and hand-wave it away, or take it as further proof that that’s just what you do to get ahead.
“Radical feminists” on tumblr are calling themselves fascists because they are happy with the porn ban.
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
Masks are off, “radical feminism” was always a front.
You want to see rampant anti-male gender bigotry in play? Bring up - and be in favour of - “paper abortions”, and watch the hate flow.
Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely in favour of giving women abortion rights. But giving rights to only one gender and blatantly denying those exact same rights to the other is the dictionary definition of gender bigotry.
And while I may not want porn and smut to be trivially accessible to non-adults - and have absolutely no use for it, myself - I also wholeheartedly support the right of any legal adult to consume that content.
CEO running the government is late stage capitalism.
Capitalism is antithetical to public services, at least according to Milton Friedman.
monopolism* utterly sucks at providing public services (except for some governmental monopolies because those can be democratically controlled)
once the starlink monopoly is broken this will happen less and less because if they raise prices the customers can switch to a different system from another company and spacex will lose money.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. Got one for my mother who lives in remote Jamaica so we could check on her after hurricanes.
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!
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.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Don’t Starlink plans offer unlimited data?
Sales and marketing documentation/websites are always bullshit.
All it ever takes is a tiny stipulation in terms+conditions to overrule ANY advertising or claims you’ve ever seen.Any company at any time: “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”
Ok that’s nice generic language. But that still doesn’t explain the context here at all.
I suppose I can be more specific.
via https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1020-91087-64
OP (or the source of OP’s image) didn’t cite what plan they’re currently on, but I don’t currently see them listing anything for $100/mo that also has a 50gb data cap. Guess that package just got cranked to a different “promotional” sign-up rate deal. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m wondering if it’s something with the mobile plan? I only have the fixed address plan and I’ve never seen a data cap. Hell, I run my homelab off of it with Plex and shit. They seem to be pretty chill but I’m do make sure to throttle my upload to be polite.
the starlink mini I think has a 50gb data cap, similar to a cell plan, and probably is intended for camping.
Some of the boat plans are limited data. It’s a completely arbitrary and bullshit restriction (and expensive) since boats can be held to ransom because the alternatives are even worse - sat phones and suchlike.
He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake…
🎼 He sees you when you’re pooping.
He knows when you’re online…
He knows when you’ve been fash or woke
So be fash for tesla’s sake 🎶
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
Leopards ate his… internet?
Then what, are you going to tell us next that going to Mars also was? Come on! /s
Amazon is launching a competing service on its own satelites.
If you’re sick of funding billionaire douchebags, Telsat (formerly Telsat Canada, a Canadian crown corporation and responsible for the first communications satellite Anik-A1 in 1972) will be live with Telsat Lightspeed in 2026. Faster, better, and far more ethical.
Ooh, I love rushing towards Kessler Syndrome.
These satellites are generally in a pretty low orbit to keep latency down. They’ll all eventually reenter once they run out of fuel.
We’re trying to speed run it, any%.
Nah, we’re going straight for the 100% speed run
Maybe they’ll collide with each other.
Probably, and well be forever imprisoned on the planet in that scenario because we won’t be able to launch anything for a long long time again.
Those LEO satellites don’t even stay 10 years in orbit without additional orbital maneuvers. It’s not forever.
It’ll act like nuclear fission in a reactor. Once a critical point is reached where a few satellites collide, their debris will spread and cause cascading collisions with other satellites. Some of that debris will quickly fall out of orbit but it may take hundreds of years for the rest to deorbit.
Is it not possible that an impact at LEO could send debris into higher orbit potentially hitting more satellites?
Yes, but…
So the most basic way orbits work, the faster you go, the higher your orbit. Any collision has to conserve momentum, so any collision will be a net deceleration.
There WILL be things that get ejected at higher velocity, but most would cause the orbit to decay instead.
Also, while there are thousands of satellites up there, they really aren’t very close to one another.
You’d need to put a LOT of really small pieces of debris, like a shuttle exploding, to cause them to spread over LEO to a point where the random collisions really out things under threat.
Not likely. Gravity is pulling it all in all the time.
LEOs are at 500km.
GPS are at 26,000km.
GEOs are 35-40,000 km.
You could end up with some elliptical orbits that send debris through those layers. But they would also likely make that debris more likely to enter the atmosphere when they come back down. Plus, the higher the orbit, the more space available in total in that orbit, so the lower the chance of a collision.
Came here to say this in a way clunkier fashion. The orbit levels aren’t even in the same neighborhood.
It’s possible of course. But Starlink satellites orbit at around 500 km and LEO ends at 2000km. It requires a significant amount of energy to push things from 500km high out of LEO. And even if debris flies out of LEO it will still come down to lower orbits and get affected by drag since it doesn’t orbit in a perfect circle. If the debris hits satellites in higher orbit it will most likely be satellites that are in LEO as well and thus still be affected by orbital decay. The higher things are in LEO the longer it takes to come down, but it’s still not forever.
Decay times grow very quickly though. At 500km altitude a debris falls back in a few months up to a couple of years, but at 800km you are looking at centuries.
Upside to that is it ensures the billionaires can’t escape and are stuck here with the rest of us who are getting increasingly angry.
We already had undersea mashed potato billionaire, I bet space mashed potato billionaire tastes much better.
Maybe with enough space junk we can reflect enough sunlight to stave off global warming.
Good
Maybe we just need stronger spacecraft. I look forward to a future where every trip to space goes through the trash zone where you hear the continuous pattering of small satellites smashing against the hull.
Fortunately, they’re all pretty low orbit, so it isn’t super permanent…
It’s also not as if we can’t launch spacecrafts at all, as long as your destination is high orbit the chances of collision are low.
Maybe that forces ppl to actually care about climate change…
That would be marvelous
I dont think he meant Kessler syndrome would be amazing. I think he is saying it would be amazing if a spacex rocket and a amazon rocket ran into each other.
I agree, he didn’t. I don’t get what you’re trying to say though?
He said a crash would be amazing and I contextualized that there’d be grave consequences if that happened, so it probably wouldn’t be that amazing.
Like a train crash. You can’t look away, and if the only co sequences were that musk and bezos lost money, looked stupid, and everyone else got a pretty fireworks show, it WOULD be amazing. Additional consequences do put a damper on that though.
