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Comment by pndy | Hacker News Reader

I haven't check their prices at all till now and holy guacamole - for about half of their monthly price my ISP gives me up to 1 Gb/s FTTH without transfer limits (asymmetric connection - tho, not an issue; speed varies from city to city but I can't complain now - it's not the faulty copper line that made me more offline than online), unlimited VoIP phone and tv with almost 200 channels and HBO GO (not that I would watch anything) and a mobile plan with 80GB per month w/ unlimited calls. And combined Shipping & Handling and Hardware would give me some 1 or 2 yo Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

It seems I'm not the target for Starlink

Since some of you decided to "punish" me: I am honestly surprised how pricey this service is in Poland and in comparison to what my ISP gives me for half of the price.

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Anyone with a fiber connection available is absolutely not the target market for starlink. It is meant for rural users with few better options. In fact, dense urban or suburban areas would overload the satellites, so subscribers in those areas will need to be limited.

I'm still not 100% convinced on the size of this market. Rural FTTH rollouts are happening and over the next 5-10 years I think will get everywhere you have grid electricity. I constantly see people on the starlink Reddit cancelling their preorders or service because they can get FTTH or cable.

There's no doubt it's an amazing technical achievement, and a huge improvement for many people. But I am somewhat struggling to see the business case for maintaining many thousands of satellites, which only last for a few years before requiring replacement, in a market that basically gets smaller each year (because more people can get FTTH or cable as rollouts increase).

Even worse, starlink performance will degrade as more users and/or average bandwidth use ticks up.

Don't you think at least some of the FTTH rollouts are because the ISP realizes they've got to upgrade or lose business to Starlink?

This rural road has some 20 homes on it. There is absolutely zero chance a local ISP decides to dig up the road on their own just to bring fiber to those 20 homes. We don't even have cable internet here.

I don't understand why people complain that I'm not supposed to use Starlink, when it's the only good internet option I have, and the same price as a much worse performing 10 Mbps option.

At my cousin's property (which I spend a lot of time at), for a little less than their monthly price, AT&T gives us an analog telephone line with local calling. That's it.

My city of about 70k people was in the pilot program of this FTTH infrastructure upgrade in the whole country and I'm really happy I could leave my old faulty copper line behind me (tho, phone number was carried over).

Cities of 70k people are not rural... Starlink is better suited for rural locations.

> It seems I'm not the target for Starlink

No schleep. It's aimed at rural users who, if they don't get laughed at for asking someone about fiber, get a quote of "Well, for half a million up front, we'll consider starting the design plans..."

Of course it’s not for you. It’s not for people with dedicated gigabit fiber lines. This should be pretty obvious.

Well, it wasn't for me - somehow I managed to avoid whole thing till now.

Then I guess you also missed that their normal plan is $100?

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