[Starlink] SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink satellite antennas, a key step to improving profitability

[Larry Press]

It's a complex, dynamic pricing problem -- available capacity is constantly changing, but consumers would not tolerate, say, service price changes every month. Maybe they reassess price when performance in an area falls below or rises above thresholds.
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From: Starlink <starlink-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of Ulrich Speidel via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 2:36 PM
To: starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Starlink] SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink satellite antennas, a key step to improving profitability


The differential pricing is a pretty obvious attempt to manage user density in the cells as they add capacity in the sky. Growing pains.

In NZ, they sold at NZ$199 at one point if you were "rural" and NZ$729 if you were "urban", except that their definitions of "rural" included the built-up CBD of a few cities with population into the 100's of thousands, and "urban" included lifestyle block areas away from the big cities. A better definition would have been:

  *   "urban" if truly urban and surrounded by sufficient geeks to drive density up (look at central Tokyo where user density seems to have gone through the roof!)
  *   "urban" if in rural areas that attract a lot of lifestylers and in which no fibre is on offer
  *   "rural" if in urban areas devoid of sufficient numbers of geeks
  *   "rural" if truly out in the sticks

But they keep changing that in quite a nimble fashion and rural and urban pricing seems to have started to converge somewhat.

Starlink's hardware pricing is only one lever, subscription is another, and that's reflected in their pricing where service is involved that goes beyond the standard stationary dishy setup. In areas that have fibre, they're not competitive - they'd need to be US$50 / month or less to even get a serious foot in the door there. Everywhere else, they are selling well as long as the locals can afford it. So quite how they will manage user density once everyone's bought a cheap dishy will be interesting - can they grow capacity faster than user base? Quite what that means for rural fibre expansion also remains to be seen. Where available, fibre offers vastly better uplink rates, lower latency, and - at present - lower ongoing pricing.

On 14/09/2023 5:52 am, Inemesit Affia via Starlink wrote:
That's quite strange. They sell equipment at different prices everywhere. So what's this price? I assume $500 to $750 but could it be even cheaper?

Amazon said thier target is $400

On Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 6:05 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net<mailto:starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>> wrote:

  *   SpaceX is no longer absorbing the cost of the Starlink antennas that it sells with its satellite internet service, a company executive said on Wednesday.
  *   “We were subsidizing terminals but we’ve been iterating on our terminal production so much that we’re no longer subsidizing terminals, which is a good place to be,” Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, said during a panel at the World Satellite Business Week conference.

[...]
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/spacex-no-longer-taking-losses-to-produce-starlink-satellite-antennas.html<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/spacex-no-longer-taking-losses-to-produce-starlink-satellite-antennas.html__;!!P7nkOOY!osuQQ0FQdZZftAEXnjygZovc84W7lLPmmSCf0IvHZcK-nhF1gjfzMw7dzWb0jOZgRInjI5CtmG3bsqM1kqIieBOKhw$>

--
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com<mailto:Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com>
living as The Truth is True

--

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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz<mailto:u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz>
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/*ulrich/__;fg!!P7nkOOY!osuQQ0FQdZZftAEXnjygZovc84W7lLPmmSCf0IvHZcK-nhF1gjfzMw7dzWb0jOZgRInjI5CtmG3bsqM1kqLADW2e1g$>
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