Tag: Starlink

Traffic jam

Starlink Introducing Capacity-Based Pricing

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Starlink just announced it will adjust pricing for residential customers. Service will become cheaper in areas the company has extra capacity, and service will become more expensive in capacity-constrained areas.

Here’s the key bit from the email I got last night:

The Starlink monthly service for residential customers is changing as follows:

  • $10 increase in areas with limited capacity. New price will be $120/month.
  • $20 decrease in areas with excess capacity. New price will be $90/month.

As a current customer in an area with limited capacity, your monthly service price will increase to $120/month beginning April 24, 2023. For new customers in your area, the price increase is effective immediately.

While it’s not great to see my bill increasing, I’m glad to see efforts to tie pricing to capacity in different regions.

Whether we’re looking at cell service or residential internet, the level of network congestion in an area can significantly affect the quality of service customers experience.1 In a somewhat convoluted way, congestion also affects the cost of delivering service.

I find it surprising that services tend to be priced as uniformly as they are throughout the country. Moving away from that uniformity probably makes the market more efficient.

Earth from space

Starlink Announces Fair Use Policy

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Starlink just announced that it will implement a Fair Use Policy for residential customers in the US and Canada sometime in December. Here’s the key bit from an email Starlink sent me:

Under the Fair Use policy, all Residential customers will receive unlimited data, and will start each month with Priority Access, which means their data usage will be prioritized during times of network congestion.

Customers who exceed 1 TB of data use on a monthly basis (currently < 10% of users) will automatically be switched to Basic Access for the remainder of the billing cycle, which means their data usage will be deprioritized during times of network congestion, resulting in slower speeds. Data used between 11pm - 7am will not count towards your Priority Access.

I figured a policy like this had to be coming for Starlink’s unlimited plans. It strikes me as a good approach. 1TB is a reasonable allotment, and heavy users still get good speeds when there’s no congestion. The exemption for data use during the lowest-traffic time of day is particularly clever. Folks with a one-off need to download a big piece of software (e.g., an AAA video game) can plan to do that at off-peak hours and avoid burning through a bunch of prioritized data.

Earth from space

Starlink Premium Announced

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Starlink just announced Starlink Premium. The new service will deliver faster speeds and use a different dish than the standard Starlink service. Starlink says the premium service may deliver download speeds between 150 and 500Mbps (roughly double the typical speeds with Starlink’s conventional service). Improvements in latency are not expected.

While the standard Starlink service requires a $500 upfront payment for a dish and $100 per month for service, the new dish costs $2500 and service costs $500 per month. Starlink Premium is available for pre-order now with a $500 deposit.

Timelines & Multiple-Dish Accounts

Here’s what Starlink says on its main webpage about Starlink Premium:

Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses. Order now to reserve, deliveries start in Q2 2022.

There’s a long waitlist for Starlink’s conventional service. The opportunity to skip that waitlist may be a big selling point for potential Premium subscribers.

In an FAQ entry, Starlink mentions that the subscribers with the Premium service may manage several Starlinks from a centralized account:

Starlink Premium delivers the same low latency with higher throughput allocation to serve small offices of 10-20 users, storefronts, and residential locations across the globe. Order as many Starlinks as needed, manage all of your service locations from a single account, and access 24/7 priority customer support.

Starlink Aiming For Global Coverage By September

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Gwynne Shotwel, SpaceX’s president and COO was recently quoted by Reuters:

We’ve successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe.”

Shotwel’s comments were made during a conversation with Macquarie Group, an investment banking company.

While Starlink may have global coverage before the end of 2021, I expect it will take longer for Starlink to offer service in the majority of countries. The company has plenty of logistical and regulatory hurdles to deal with.

Earth and space

Upcoming Starlink Update

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Yesterday, Starlink shared an update email with subscribers in the company’s beta program. The email mentioned several recent improvements to Starlink’s product. An upcoming, major update was also mentioned:

Today, your Starlink speaks to a single satellite assigned to your terminal for a particular period of time. In the future, if communication with your assigned satellite is interrupted for any reason, your Starlink will seamlessly switch to a different satellite, resulting in far fewer network disruptions.

It sounds like the new feature may be rolled out gradually with most users getting the update sometime this month:

This feature will be available to most beta users in April and is expected to deliver one of our most notable reliability improvements to date.
Stary Sky

Starlink First Impressions

Christian Leave a comment

I joined Starlink’s beta and recently got the service up and running. While I’ll write a detailed review eventually, I thought I’d share my first impressions now.

Like others in the beta, I paid about $500 for my satellite dish (Dishy as Starlink calls it) and router. Taxes and shipping added about $100 more.

The Dishy, a basic mount, a router, and cords all showed up in one giant box:

Starlink starter kit box

Setup was incredibly easy. Here’s how simple Starlink’s instructions were:

Starlink setup instructions

Most of the cords were already plugged-in where they belonged. Within about 15 minutes of opening the box, I connected a computer over Wi-Fi and ran a test finding a download speed of about 35Mbps. I ran about a dozen tests in total, and I think that first test found the lowest speed of them all. Here are the results from the first test I ran over a wired connection:

Test result showing 30ms ping and 78.5 Mbps download speed

Starlink suggested I should expect download speeds between 50Mbps and 150Mbps during the beta. Nearly all of my tests showed speeds in that range, but typically in the lower end of the range (50-100Mbps).

While people often focus on speeds, I think speed is an overrated performance metric. Once a connection exceeds something like 20Mbps, further speed increases have vastly diminishing returns.1

Latency is where Starlink shines. My tests consistently showed latency below 50ms. That’s roughly on-par with the typical latency for cable or DSL connections. It’s also about an order of magnitude lower than the usual latency for satellite internet.

I continue to be excited to see where things go with Starlink. I’ll share more as I continue to trial the service.

Miscellaneous notes

  • After setting up my service, I decided to grab the Starlink app in case I missed anything important. The app worked fine, but I didn’t learn anything new from it.
  • Starlink’s communication style is refreshingly informal. It’s the opposite of the corporate-bullshit speak that’s typical from ISPs. E.g., the Starlink beta was named “The Better Than Nothing Beta.” I’d love to see Starlink keep up the current vibe as the service matures.
  • The router has one available Ethernet port (separate from the port used to connect to Dishy).
  • The router’s design is unique (Cybertruck-esque).
Speed abstract

Will Starlink Double Speeds This Year?

Christian Leave a comment

When I got invited to Starlink’s beta, the company included this message in my invitation email:

During beta, users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms in most locations over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

Yesterday, a Starlink user tweeted a screenshot showing a download speed of 130Mbps and a latency of 44ms. Here’s the reply Elon Musk left:

It’s an audacious goal. While some tests with Starlink have already shown sub-20ms latency, that kind of performance is far from typical. Getting speeds to 300Mbps this year would be a real accomplishment.

In the last several months, Musk has made a handful of bold predictions. He has claimed humans will probably land on Mars in the next 6 years and that Tesla will be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving by the end of 2021. While I don’t think either of those predictions will come to fruition, I find Musk’s speculation about Starlink’s performance more plausible. I think there’s about a 50% chance the prediction will look basically correct a year from now.

Starlink Expansion

Christian Leave a comment

Several bits of news about SpaceX’s Starlink came out yesterday.

#1 Pre-orders are open

Starlink started accepting pre-orders in a whole bunch of countries. If you’re living in an eligible area, you can enter your address on Starlink’s website and get a rough estimate for when Starlink service will be available to you. A pre-order can be placed by putting down about $100

#2 More beta invites

It looks like Starlink may have sent out a record number of invitations to the beta program yesterday. And I got one!

I paid about $500 for the satellite dish and router plus about $100 more for shipping and taxes. Starlink is suggesting shipping may take 2-4 weeks right now since the company is dealing with a heavy volume of orders.

In an email I received, Starlink doubled down on some performance claims (emphasis mine):

During beta, users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms in most locations over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically. For latency, we expect to achieve 16ms to 19ms by summer 2021.

I’m excited to get started testing Starlink, and I’ll try to share details about my experience as soon as possible.

#3 Starlink tweets

SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, recently shared a few noteworthy tweets about Starlink. One vague tweet touched on a potential Starlink IPO:

Another tweet included some sober details about the difficulties of running a satellite internet business:

Finally, I thought this exchange was great:

More On Starlink Terminal Costs

Christian Leave a comment

A Business Insider article (paywalled) came out a few hours ago and suggested SpaceX is paying STMicroelectronics about 2.4 billion dollars to manufacture a million Starlink terminals. Business Insider kept the identity of its source confidential, but the source is described as someone “known to Business Insider.”

The source is quoted saying:

The production agreement specifies 1 million terminals at a price of roughly $2,400 each.

$2,400 is a significantly higher price tag than I would have expected for a terminal, but I’m not sure how seriously to take the new information. While I think it’s true that STMicroelectronics is manufacturing Starlink terminals, the full details of SpaceX’s arrangement weren’t communicated in the Business Insider piece. I wouldn’t be surprised if millionth terminal’s marginal cost ends up well under $2,400.

Satellite Dish

Starlink’s Terminal Costs

Christian Leave a comment

Starlink beta testers can purchase a user terminal and a router for about $500. Starlink probably sells these terminals at a significant loss. In a tweet shared earlier this month, Elon Musk wrote:

Lowering Starlink terminal cost, which may sound rather pedestrian, is actually our most difficult technical challenge.

In a recent earnings call, Pradman Kaul, CEO and President of Hughes Network Systems, gave some perspective on the cost of Starlink’s terminal in comparison to conventional terminals for satellite internet:

The big advantage we would have over Starlink is the economics…Our antenna in Jupiter [Hughes’ terminal], it costs $40 to $50. I think most people would agree that, today, the phased array antenna [what Starlink uses] costs are around $1,400, $1,500. So the economics just going to not be a big advantage for them. In fact, it’s going to make our offerings much more attractive.