> astronomical fee

Compared to what?

Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.

Compared to leveraging the existing cellular networks and using satellites for rare edge cases. ~8$/minute or say 1$/minute averages out to a more reasonable number when less than 5% of calls use it.

Not for somebody whose job is outside the existing networks, such as sailors.

Sailors can make calls using the ships Wi-Fi via full sized Starlink dishes, they need coverage on land.

But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.

The setup cost for Starlink on a boat is still massively higher than on land.

Yes, but compared to the setup for equivalent satellite services it is very cheap. The Inmarsat antennas need active compensation and they sit inside big radomes, while the Starlink antennas are smaller and do not need to move thanks to being phased arrays.

The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.

Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.

250$/month gets you 50GB/month on the open ocean and unlimited on waterways, higher demand is cheaper per GB ex: 1TB for 1,000$/month. https://www.starlink.com/boats

Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.

Is the reason that Starlink charges so much more for boats is low competition? Or is there something obviously much more complex / expensive about beaming gigs of data from space over the ocean vs land? I don't write this post with any spite; I am genuinely curious.

Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station hooked up to fiber. To work over the ocean you pass messages between satellites potentially several hops and then eventually down to a base station, but that’s inherently constrained as with all mess topologies you get far less bandwidth than initially seems possible.

So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.

    > Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station

Is this true? If yes, how do you know it?

When it launched there was no inter-satellite connectivity at all.

> all mess topologies

all mesh topologies

It’s priced based on value. 8oz of Coke costs vary at a supermarket shelf, gas station and an airplane.

My friend is a boat captain in Florida.He says that Starlink on his boat changed his life.

I think OP is pointing out the pun in this case.

I concur, and I appreciate the pun :)

Terrestrial fees

Hope there are no hidden Extra Terrestrial fees

LEO fees?

Yep, definitely beyond sky-high prices :)

The inside buildings part would be mostly solved with VoWiFi. At least anywhere with a network you'd be comfortable connecting to.

Could future versions work in buildings? What’s the issue there? Just that it’s father away than a cell tower is?

Starlink signals are essentially line of sight right now. The bump up in power to penetrate even a single layer of drywall is almost certainly way outside the power budget of a Starlink satellite.

Whether a material is opaque to it. Buildings are transparent to lower frequency radio. Imagine that the satellites transmitted in visible light, doesnt really matter how powerful it is if you're in a room with no windows.

My 5g doesn't work inside of many buildings.

because providers retain their more penetrating frequencies on the 3G or 4G signal to maintain universal coverage

keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense

Starlink is used in low density areas. You could setup LTE towers at a remote mine and use Starlink for the back haul, but for their customers using WiFi calling gives the same benefit without extra hardware.