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 8 months 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 8 months 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 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

    > 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 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		When it launched there was no inter-satellite connectivity at all.

▲ Retric 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> all mess topologies

all mesh topologies

▲ Spooky23 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

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