[andrewharvey]

this.

Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

[rob74]

The question that comes up then is: how much traffic can Starlink handle until it gets saturated? I'm not sure it can handle even a significant percentage of the users that currently use wired connectivity. And if they see that demand for their services starts overwhelming supply, they will definitely raise the prices...

[ACCount37]

Starlink has, essentially, fixed capacity per area. Thus, sparsely placed rural users are "cheap" to Starlink.

Densely placed city users would strain the system, but cities also favor wired connectivity.

That makes the two complimentary. Wired makes the most sense in urban formations, satcom makes the most sense in Bum Fuck Nowhere.

[JonChesterfield]

_Lots_ of traffic. It's going to end up being the global Internet backbone.

[ale42]

Internet traffic today is estimated to be a few tens of exabytes per day. Even if you assume 100000 Starlink satellites (we're far from that), each satellite would have to handle hundreds of terabytes per day. That's tens of gigabits per second per satellite, assuming traffic is split evenly among them (will never happen in real situations).

[vablings]

Starlink V3 can pump out some seriously impressive speeds and handle thousands of clients. Starlink is both a great leap forward in rocketry and radio technology. I do still think funny how we are going back to the pre war technology tree for a re-visit

[tzs]

That's not even sufficient to handle the needs of a single large city. The limitation is that even with the much larger constellation they hope to deploy there won't be enough satellites visible at once from any given large metro area.

[angoragoats]

Citation definitely needed.

[Affric]

Grid prices are going to start coming down in some of the most expensive parts of Australia due to SAPS, home generation and storage, and microgrids.

I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.

[markdown]

If you find Starlink cheap they just haven't gotten around to the bait and switch in your locality. It'll come.

[Nursie]

This is because Australia has high internet prices. Partly because it's huge, but partly because the NBN got stuffed-up by the Liberals because they didn't believe the country should be investing in what they called at the time "a glorified video delivery service", so put the tech back a decade, and the country ended up paying more for a worse rollout.

Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.

If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.

So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.

[UltraSane]

Man, I pay $50USD/month for 1Gbps up down in Wisconsin.

[sam1r]

Wicked, I wonder what the most juiced option would cost amongst your upgrade options.

“When in Wisconsin.”

[raw_anon_1111]

Where are you? In the suburbs of Atlanta I paid $80 for AT&T Fiber 1Gbps u/d.

[gnabgib]

If they're paying Australian Dollars.. probably not Atlanta