Starlink is reducing your monthly service fee
I've just received a very pleasant surprise in email. Subscription in the UK was £89 per calendar month:
Effective 24/08/2022, Starlink is reducing your monthly service fee to £75.
The price reduction factors in your local market conditions and is meant to reflect parity in purchasing power across our customers.
No action is needed from you, the price reduction will be automatically reflected on invoices generated after 24/08/2022.
Thank you for being an early customer and for your continued support of Starlink!While on the topic of Starlink, I wanted to share this cool Youtube video [1] I watched tonight on how it works (PCBA design, beam forming, orbital velocity, up/downlink bandwidth as a result...etc). It's a bit long but has some good details!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&ab_channel=Branc...
Got a similar email for my service in Mexico. Genuinely surprised and joyful with this company.
Not only does it work with minimal effort almost anywhere but they also reduce prices without going through call center hell.
No way Comcast or Telmex would do this.
Brazil: down from R$500 ($100) to R$230($46)
Setup fee+hardware from $1000 to $400.
Price of local fiber: $30 for 600Mb/s
I have never seen a company inform all users that they will automatically pay less for the same service...
In Poland it went from 449zl down to 230zl ($48). Impressive.
Adjustment for the pound falling versus the dollar I guess?
I should have pointed out in the UK the cost includes 20% Value Added Tax (VAT) so the actual charge has reduced from £74.10 to £62.50 (US$87.44 to US$73.75 @ £1=US$1.18 on 2022-08-25).
I just hope they don’t go bankrupt. With 250,000 customers they are making at best $25m per year. Can see how that’s enough to sustain the whole thing.
I can imagine there’s a direct connection to Apples announcement on Sep 7th. I don’t recall all the details, but read a report, that Apple bought a partially defunct satellite network, that has only very few, but therefore geostationary satellites which come with bandwidth licenses that exceed Starlink’s by a lot. Might be totally wrong, but did anybody else hear that rumor?
In France 100 EUR => 50 EUR too:
https://www.phonandroid.com/starlink-divise-par-deux-le-prix...
I got this too for my Starlink unit in Ukraine. Dropped to $60 from $100. A welcome change although I for some reason assumed it was specifically for Ukraine. Looks like it’s in a number of markets.
Sames goes for Germany with 80€ and the German Telekom still isn't able to provide me a decent connection although fiber is installed in almost all adjacent streets...
Did any EU regulation or competiton get announced recently? Because it seems limited to that region, ironically.
I got fiber installed last week! WOOT
The comments here showering Starlink with praise, acting like they're doing this to be a Bro, are bizarre.
Starlink didn't drop prices out of the goodness of their hearts.
They dropped prices because they had to. Why is debatable, but signs point to the network crumbling apart, causing them to lose customers.
It hasn't been able to scale to handle the customer load, even in rural areas: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-massive-growth-results-...
"Hundreds of miles south near Leonard, Texas, John Lawyer has encountered download rates on his Starlink dish that can dive as low as 1Mbps, especially during the evenings."
That's a town of 2,000, in a county of 35,000.
New customers are probably also put off by the signup costs and problems with "Dishy" - thermal shutdowns, a permanently attached cable for power/data, and being fairly fragile.
What about in US?