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

▲ dasv 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲ Retric 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ throwaway2037 14 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲ Retric 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲ throwaway2037 4 hours ago | parent [-]

    > 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?

	▲	mike_hearn 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When it launched there was no inter-satellite connectivity at all.

▲ Spooky23 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲ threeseed 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are plenty of YouTube videos showing Starlink on basic sailing yachts.

It takes a day at most if you want a simple setup.

	▲	lr1970 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My friend is a boat captain in Florida.He says that Starlink on his boat changed his life.