SpaceX’s Starlink is now the new normal for remote or mobile Internet service delivery and like all disruptive innovations there comes with it the precipitous decline of the ‘disrupted’, namely traditional geostationary satellite services like the Sky Muster satellites that host NBN’s Sky Mesh service.
Starlink has 5874 satellites in a vast constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) 550km above the earth’s surface. Starlink’s satellites move rapidly, provide more consistent coverage, and do so at far lower latency 20 – 60 milliseconds which is comparable to most terrestrial Internet services, top that off with bandwidths between 50 – 150 megabits/second, what’s not to like?
In the early days of 2020/21, the initial Starlink service was $139AUD /month with no limits and no lock in contract. Today this service is still the Starlink standard non-priority service, and if you’re happy with the occasional ‘loading’ for some real-time applications for streaming, then this will suffice.
But here’s the rub, as contention increases, and the service slows down (like the NBN 4pm quagmire as the kids finish school) or you have a time sensitive application then you need to pay for the priority services, this is the sting in the tail. Like all things that are too good to be true there is no such thing as free unlimited Internet. As the uptake has grown so has the contention and in keeping with the principals of supply and demand Starlink’s pricing has morphed.
The priority service cost structure is based on traffic priority coupled with upper limit data caps, which are by no means cheap.
As at May 2024 Starlink’s pricing comes with fixed and mobile options – for people at fixed geographical location, say at home, the fixed access plans are:
- Fixed Priority – 40GB – AUD $176 /Month
- Fixed Priority – 1TB – AUD $374 /Month
- Fixed Priority – 2TB – AUD $748 /Month
- Fixed Priority – 6TB – AUD $2,233 /Month
And mobile plans for the those who are traveling in their caravan / boat or 4WD.
- Mobile Priority – 50GB – $374.00AUD /Month
- Mobile Priority – 1TB – $1,486.00AUD /Month
- Mobile Priority – 5TB – $7,433.00AUD /Month
As indicated above, the pricing is not for the faint of heart or budget conscious.
That said, the $139 non-priority access plan is still the base service offering, and is a bargain given the technology and what you get. For most users the base service is more than enough. The low-latency coupled with high bandwidth means that applications like streaming and real-time services – voice / video – function very well. But depending on the demand there is always to spectre of contention, eventually many users will be forced into the priority service offering as contention increases, or they simply put up with the contention.
In the old days’ of VSAT, satellite services were horrendously expensive to setup and access, with satellite service providers in lockstep on pricing, making the 5TB priority service that Starlink as asking feel like chump change. In a VSAT scenario, a 5TB x 100Mb/s satellite service would have cost $40k – 50k to setup and $25k per month to access, and thankfully those days are gone. So, it seems like the genie is out of the bottle and SpaceX have proved that LEO is viable, it’s now a waiting game to see what happens as more LEOs like OneWeb come online.