No plan for equal Starlink internet prices

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell does not think the company will add a “pricing” for its direct-to-consumer Starlink satellite internet service, which is currently offered at $ 99 per month with limited early access.

“I do not think we are going to do tariff pricing to consumers. We are going to try to keep it as simple and transparent as possible, so there are currently no plans to increase consumers,” Shotwell said. , who spoke on Tuesday in a virtual panel on Satellite 2021’s LEO Digital Forum.

In an applied pricing system, the customer relies on the level of service he or she chooses.

Starlink is the company’s capital – intensive project to build an interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites, called a constellation in the space industry, designed to deliver high – speed internet to consumers across the planet.

The company has so far launched more than 1,200 satellites to orbit.

In October, SpaceX launched early Starlink service in a public beta that now applies to customers in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and New Zealand – with a price tag of $ 99 per month in the US, in addition to an upfront cost for the equipment needed to connect to the satellites.

Elon Musk’s company continued to expand Starlink’s service, and the public beta gained more than 10,000 users in the first three months. Shotwell noted that SpaceX does not “have a time frame to get out of the beta phase” and said the company still “needs to do a lot of work to make the network reliable”.

Musk’s company plans to expand Starlink beyond homes, asking the FCC to expand its connectivity to ‘moving vehicles’ so that the service can be used with everything from aircraft to ships to large trucks.

At the moment, SpaceX is focused on serving customers in rural and hard-to-reach areas, with Shotwell saying that Starlink will be able to serve ‘every rural household in the United States’ or ‘about 60 million people’. While SpaceX is adding service to other countries, Shotwell said SpaceX was initially targeted at the US “because they speak English and are close, and if they have a problem with their dish, we can ship one quickly.”

“But we definitely want to expand this capability beyond the US and Canada,” Shotwell added.

One major obstacle for Starlink, as well as any satellite-based broadband service, is the cost of user terminals: the equipment on the ground that connects customers to the network.

Shotwell said SpaceX had made “great progress in reducing costs” from the Starlink user terminal, which was originally about $ 3,000 each. She said the terminal now costs less than $ 1,500 and SpaceX “just rolled out a new version that saved about $ 200 of the cost.”

This means that SpaceX covers about two-thirds of the cost of the terminal, as the company charges beta customers $ 499 in advance for a user terminal. Musk said earlier this year that Starlink “should go through a deep gulf of negative cash flow,” a significant portion of which is expected to be due to the cost of user terminals.

Although SpaceX has so far not charged the full cost of the terminal, Shotwell said the company does expect the cost to reach a few hundred dollar range within the next year or two.

Shotwell reiterated previous remarks by SpaceX’s leadership that Starlink did not use the services of ‘giant suppliers AT&T, Comcast, etc.’ Do not want to replace, as she noted that the satellite Internet “is very complimentary to the services they provide.”

“The Starlink system is best suited for rural or semi-rural populations,” Shotwell said.

Meanwhile, Shotwell said SpaceX’s challenge is to learn how to scale for consumer customers, while ‘making sure we can build a reliable network’. But, she adds, none of these challenges are “what we can not solve.”