I think they are overpriced for what they deliver, at least in my part of the world (north of Houston.) I dropped them last month once the extra $10 made it go to $120, they charge $90 in other places in the US. I guess the MBAs are doing "market segmentation," in other words, just charging what the market can bear, well given the state of the economy and the costs of goods, they pushed me out of that market.

I switched to Verizon LTE and it's been really great 50/5 ish for $50. A pretty good price for the service, Starlink is not 140% better, in fact it's worse on average, and did not get better for the year that I had it... well actually it got progressively worse on average.

Now if they ever offer a reasonable plan for a reasonable price, I'll be all over it, I like redundancy. A 50/5 for about $50/mo would probably bring me back, or even a smaller bandwidth for less money would probably bite and I really want them to succeed.

In the case of the WISPs, I can definitely believe the churn. WISPs that run libreqos are more than likely very well run networks, I bet those who leave quickly realize how good they have had it. Of course StarLink can probably mirror (for all practical purposes) a well run WISP, if they would only listen/hire you for a little while and fix their bufferbloat!

Speaking of WISPs, I thought I was going to get NextLink service at my place, but it turns out the system isn't quite here yet. I got excited since I've read that they were deploying Tarana gear, and was looking forward to testing that out, I've only seen very little with regards to the Tarana gear in a real world environment. I live among the tall pines of east Texas and getting line of sight requires obnoxiously large towers. Anybody else has any information about the Tarana systems in the real world and not just a PtP quick test? This was pretty interesting though as someone who appreciates redundant/fault tolerant systems:

https://www.taranawireless.com/ngfwa-technology-that-keeps-customers-connected/

-Luis

On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 7:48 AM Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M

Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
(and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]

This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
offshore*, in the comments.

Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
projecting 4-5 flights this year.

https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536

I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
size.

Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)

[1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536

--
AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
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