[garciasn]

Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.

Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.

I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.

[kemotep]

Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency.

I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.

I live in rural Ohio.

[garciasn]

It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.

My lake home is in Central MN.

[kemotep]

Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.

[vel0city]

It's not really a global service in terms of service area, it's many many many small service zones. You can only be serviced by the satellites overhead after all.

You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.

[deathanatos]

> Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service.

… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?

> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area

I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.

[erikerikson]

In Kitsap county the municipality owned lines can be used via a service contract with any number of service providers. Kinda a monopoly and kinda not.

[kergonath]

That is the right way of doing it. It does not make any sense to have 3 companies building last-mile infrastructure in a neighbourhood, but you can have multiple service providers competing and using the same cables. But then, public oversight on the de-facto infrastructure monopoly is critical.

[deathanatos]

… so it's another Chattanooga. These are highly exceptional cases, compared to most of the nation.

(They seem to work well, from what I've read of them.)

[opello]

Rural telephone cooperatives that moved to fiber tend to provide an alternative in places where cable companies were the dominant urban option. Some of those cable companies also moved to fiber. The service areas end up overlapped and some competition keeps prices in check.

[Marsymars]

I only have one FTTH connection to my house, but if I stretched I could probably claim “3 fiber providers in the area” - the local cable co does FTTN with 2000/200 service and there’s an independent fibre provider that serves multi-unit buildings in the downtown.