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Starlink unlimited aviation plan to rise from $10k/month to $20k

110 points by r2sk5t

by khurs

2 subcomments

There will be many price increases seeing as:
-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25b (depending on bond length in years 2031,33,36,46 and 2056)
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
So huge amounts needed continuously.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...

by BoppreH

6 subcomments

Note that this is for the "aviation plan" which already requires six-digits equipment.

by justapassenger

2 subcomments

I’m pretty sure rest of starlink customers will get similar treatment in the future. Their potential customer base is limited and it’s only ISP that literately burns their backbone network every few years and has to replace to keep it running.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.

by delichon

3 subcomments

At the other end they recently doubled the cost of the Starlink Mini standby plan, from $60 to $120 per year.

by amluto

0 subcomment

This stinks.
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.

by jameskraus

2 subcomments

It is an reckless business practice to not have the monthly price locked down, with strong contractual protections. Sounds like Correnti didn't negotiate well and are now finding out.

by p-o

2 subcomments

Hard to not look at the crazy valuation of SpaceX and not see a correlation. At some point, something's gotta give.

by theturtletalks

0 subcomment

What’s even more concerning is that the current government changed their requirements for the rural broadband program so companies like StarLink can bid to bring internet to those remote areas instead of using wired or fiber connections. Not far-fetched that StarLink wins this contract and then squeezes those customers over time. ISPs will have little reason to expand in those underserved areas without government subsidies.

by w10-1

2 subcomments

Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
I'd see this as an opportunity.

by hughes

0 subcomment

There is a nuance missed in the discussion so far - Starlink is creating a new product level, differentiating service between continental and intercontinental aviation connectivity. Previously these were a single category.
If you are operating in North America for example, your service is going from $10k to $12.5k. Still a 25% increase, which is not fun, but I think a lot of the customers affected by this will fit into this category. You only need the $20k plan if your aircraft travels between their roughly-continental regions.
Nicholas Air, quoted in the article, appears to have no need for the $20k plan and should not use it.

by Antwan

0 subcomment

So private jets can no longer offer high speed internet to their customers. That’s so sad.

by CamelCaseName

2 subcomments

This is so par for the course for Elon's companies.
He will extract as much as possible, whenever possible.

by epistasis

1 subcomments

Gotta pay the massive coupons on SpaceX's bonds, whose yields are heading towards junk territory:
https://www.ft.com/content/3a023b95-66c3-41e1-b0ce-df752a499...
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.

by petilon

1 subcomments

Blue Origin's Terawave [1] can't come soon enough.
[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave

by khurs

2 subcomments

>SpaceX has also increased the price of its Starlink Aviation equipment to $200,000 per business aircraft, up from $145,000 last year.
ouch.

by grim_io

0 subcomment

You don't get to be all of the USA's GDP without a buck or two more per month, you know?

by kamranjon

5 subcomments

I am traveling in Europe currently and got a Saily SIM card - 5g coverage is really good and seems to be expanding fast - a small village I visited 2 years ago that had no cell coverage at all I was getting 250mbps download, faster than than the wired internet at most of the places I was visiting. This prompted me to actually look into Starlink speeds and apparently 5g is generally faster than Starlink...
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?

by ck2

0 subcomment

isn't Amazon LEO now available or very soon at $60/month?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmazonLeo/comments/1uupd3w
will they offer aviation suitable plans?

by panative

3 subcomments

Won’t somebody please think of the luxury private aviation consumers?

0 subcomment

by behnamoh

3 subcomments

As I write this, I'm disputing a charge from Starlink because when I activated mine, they automatically started the free trial for me, but nowhere in the receipt or on their website did they say they would switch me to the most expensive plan after the free trial was over. And they made it extremely confusing to cancel my free trial. So I ended up being charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box. I disputed it twice through Apple Card and it still got rejected, even though I have the invoices. So I'm disputing it a third time, and I know one thing is clear: I am never going to purchase anything that Elon has made ever again. They also lied to me about the cost of keeping the Starlink. Their app said the satellite would need to stay "alive," and to do so I had to pay $5 a month. But then I recently realized that that was also a lie—you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive.

by ihsw

0 subcomment

[dead]

by ForOldHack

0 subcomment

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Well, well well. The honeymoon is over. It's just so predictable.