Worth if when no DSL, Fibre or 4G options are available?
Worth even if other options are available because latency/price?
Coming from a country with a lower purchasing power in dollars, 100$ would make this not an option even for many even if no other options are available. Still, if the same connection was shared between 4 homes it would be a great improvement.
In rural areas, your only option is often cellular (3G/4G) "hotspots" and the monthly cost will be outrageous unless you can convince everyone in your house to stay off of Netflix, etc.
If you're in a rural area and you want Internet access for streaming video or your kids who are in school or just don't want to have to deal with or worry about data caps (with outrageous overage fees!), this is quite likely your best ption.
The $100 monthly cost isn't unreasonable. You're going to be paying probably $60-70 for spotty cellular service with a data cap and/or throttling anyways, so might as well pay the little bit extra and not have to worry about it.
The one-time $500 setup/equipment fee will be harder to justify. I expect Starlink will offer an option to spread that out over a year or two which would make it much easier for some households.
That said, only techies seem to bother with that even though it's generally worth it for the power efficiency alone, let alone the equipment rental costs
A high end DVR may cost close to 1000$ and a 20$/month equipment fee will barely break even over the life of the device...
I’m on some hotspot plans that are no longer available that have no caps, but I’m pretty lucky with the speeds I get. For me it’ll depend on what speeds Starlink gets in my area, and I might keep one hotspot anyways as it’s handy to have.
If you have no other option, this is a very good price. In a lot of places with options, this is still a good price.
Performance is more than just a set of numbers, so we shall see how well it works. If it's good, I think it will cause a revolution in American broadband.
Having a service like this would allow me to truly expand where I could have a weekend house, to the point where the money saved on the house could pay for a decade or more of this service, with plenty left over.
It will be interesting to see if any existing providers feel the need to lower their prices in response to Starlink becoming more widely available. That's how competition is supposed to work, right?
Given the apparent high initial cost, this does not look like a viable option to replace my current service. I think cost would need to get down to 75 ish a month and maybe 200 startup.
Does anyone know how this has help up in bad weather (rain? snow?)