I use to be a Sat /Comms/Network engineer. Worked for two major Cruise Lines. As per your possible inquiry on 8:45 - No, it does NOT cost Starlink any more if you are on land or ocean. Starlink satellites do not work the same as the old satellite style does. The old style was that a customer linked/pointed to a satellite that was in high orbit (geosynchronous orbit) Which just means it's stationary above one area like satellite DISH TV and therefore cover MANY customers with one Sat. With Starlink satellites the customer links to one satellite that orbits in a non-geostationary orbit and your dish finds the next following starlink satellite and connects to it before losing the previous link as it moves out of your line-of-sight hence the need for many starlink satellites (hence the starlink net). Since these Starlink satellites are circling the Earth and passing over land AND WATER the "Many customers to one satellite" (old way) does NOT apply and therefore does NOT cost any more. -- What does cost is the production of so many satellites and rocket ship launches to put them up in space and so to get as much money for funding as quickly as possible they charge more money to those customers that are "different" using that "different" excuse to charge more. Those satellites are NOT doing anything different to ocean connections as they are to land connections. --- Great video, thank you.

I remember my dad looking for a used car in the newspaper. Before deciding on calling the owner, he would page through the phone book to see if that number was a local call, a zone call, or long distance. How things have changed!

Regarding cost over sea vs over land - Starlink is very different from satellite internet before. The satellites are not geosynchronous!! That means they are not stationary over an area; instead they use a vast network/constellation of little and relatively inexpensive satellites all zipping around and communicating with each other. This means that the coverage at sea is mostly just "accidental". Of course they are happy to proved service (and collect revenue) by supplying internet to boats at sea. But those satellites would be there regardless even if they only wanted to provide internet to land. So no, it is not more expensive for them to provide internet to boats. They just know that people with boats are more likely to accept a higher price tag. I've been waiting to see what happens with starlink to see if I get it. Thanks for testing the waters for the rest of us!

I wish Starlink was listening. Having an internet connection while traveling on the open sea is a huge safety gain. Using the service to watch videos is not on my menu. But getting accurate and timely weather data, connecting with shore-based support (engine trouble, for example), and keeping loved ones assured with our progress reporting are all extremely valuable. I wish they would offer a lower-speed version so that email, text messaging and basic phone service stayed up.

The call-back to the cell-phone and internet of the late 90s/early 00s was really insightful, and accurate.

Great analysis of this. I do think that $250 is still a pretty amazing price for oceanwide, on demand, high speed internet. This price will be driven down, but it's a groundbreaking technology. It won't be cheap for a while.

You very accurately conveyed what has transpired. Look forward to Amazon satellite packages! Competition can be quite beneficial for consumers. Take Care

I just looked at the Maritime plan and it actually looks like the maritime plan went from $1000 to $250 per month. Last time I checked was like 2 weeks ago. Of course there is a higher equipment cost, but it seems to be $2500 equipment cost for maritime and mobility, and business at $250 a month for service. And $599 equipment cost for roam at $150 a month for service.

50gigs will stream more than 100 hours of KZfaq at 480p, honestly do we all really need to watch 3-4 hours of KZfaq everyday? I guess on an ocean passage that might be nice, but I'm going to blow your mind right now; Every movie ever made in existence is on the internet and available to download right this second.

Another work around that might help some is to setup a Raspberry Pi and run Jellyfin on it with modest sized SSD ~2gb and store all of your media backups for your own off grid boat based Netflix !

You're right that infrastructure for boats costs more, but for the wrong reasons. Starlink satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit. So they MUST have enough satellites to cover the ocean, just to get good coverage on land. ie: each satellite goes all the way around the Earth, so you need to fill that ring with enough satellites that your target service area is always covered. However, Starlink satellites can communicate with three things: your dishy, a ground-based access point, and each other. To service the land, the dishy sends to the satellite which sends to the ground-based access point. On the ocean, there is no ground-based access point, so instead, your dishy talks to the satellite which talks to a satellite which talks to a satellite which eventually reaches a ground-based access point. So to service requests on the ocean takes significantly more power and bandwidth than over land.

Tim, you do a really good job of communicating. Well done!

Anyone here remember pagers? In the beginning only ER doctors could afford them. Before they became completely obsolete they offered unlimited text for about $8 a month.

Well done, as always. Thanks for doing the digging and the honest (and spot on!) explanation of what it all means.

Very level headed expiation of the current situation! Thanks

I liked your video and learned a few things about billing options. I just have the static land version at the moment. I did want to comment on how Starlink works in relation to your comment about out in the ocean. It doesn't really cost them more, but it is a limited resource (at the moment). Two things are going on: (1) There are pretty much the same number of satellites over any given latitude at any one time. IOW, there are just as many serving over the mid Atlantic at 40.7 degrees latitude as there are over New York city. Since there are no users out there (relatively speaking) the satellites have really nothing to do. Having anybody hitting one would be just free money to them. (2) BUT...over land, when you browse to some site, it goes to the satellite and then directly back down to a ground station then to the site. At mid-Atlantic, that satellite that is serving the boat, can't see the ground station. It must relay to one or more other satellites to finally reach the ground station. So... you are using more resources for your connection out in mid ocean. The problem is... the first generation of satellites did NOT have this relay capability. It is my understanding that the first ones that did are the ones launched on a polar orbit out of Vandenberg in California... and there are very few of those satellites comparatively, but enough to handle the current high-end ocean customers (and the military). As time goes on, all the satellites are supposed to have that capability and hopefully there will be no reason for high costs, except to gouge what the market will bare.

The way i see it. 250.00 a month for internet at sea is cheap as chips. 8.00 a day. I remember intennet caffe at 6.00 per hour or maybe 2.00 at a cheap shop. The ability to pause is key for me. If that goes away, so do i.

We received a email 4 months ago from Starlink (ground based) saying our service will be cut back because we use to much data (2 seniors with IPads on most of the time and internet TV so we were sometimes using 1T an month so we cut back on our usage to prevent our service from being downgraded. Yesterday we received a email saying that our service will not be downgraded and we can use as much data as we want anytime peak or off peak times as well our monthly cost will be going down and if we want we can buy a additional dish for 20% ($1000) of what we paid for our present dish. It’s all a bit confusing just like Twitter 🤪

Thank you for the most reasoned brief on what's happening, that I've seen so far. And I don't expect a better one, anytime soon. Experience definitely enables us to take a broader and longer view of events. In my own case, this ability took far too long to develop! ;)

I just got my Starlink with a Roam/Mobile Regional service for my boat on Lake Ontario. This works for what I am doing since not on the Ocean. The option for the mobile priority that allows for use in motion and on the water is like double to cost and only 50GB. The Canadian price I see is $320. As Tim says this will all change. So stay awake!

Starlink has just deployed a set of "high Earth orbit" (instead of the common low Earth orbit) satellites. They are further away with a bit of time lag. There are only a few of them and they were deployed for airlines, ocean-going freighters and cruise ships. They are huge, compared to the earlier version.

It's one of the best use cases for their product. I can't believe they would make it this difficult/expensive to use it that way. If i was Starlink i would do everything to prove they power of my product.

Terms of Service? A friend had an IMTS mobile phone active in his car when a large piston airliner crashed on takeoff. He parked his car in the middle of the mess, opened the doors, and let every emergency, doctor, fireman, and aviation person call unlimited and unhampered. The result was a mobile phone bill that needed a handtruck. The phone company realized that almost all these calls were dire unselfish emergencies, and they plucked out the monthly fee, circled the rest with a red pen, and made them disappear. Sailboats are among the most likely Starlink users to find themselves in the rescue role. They are the most likely customers to find a collision, fire, piracy, storm wreck, or plane downing of any vessel. ...About sea bandwidth. Sea bandwidth utilizes almost completely unburdened horizontal relay Starlinks. The relay eventually reaches shore based Starlink ground connections. If every Pitcairn, Galapagos, Midway, sailboat, junk, and swordfish sailor surfed Starlink, heavily, they would hardly put a scratch in the service, and they would be dipping into the cheapest bandwidth of all. Starlink was supposed to become friendlier and cheaper. They have lost their way.

I bought my starlink here in Mexico its 1350 pesos per month which is about $72 a month and 40 pesos per GB which is about $2.00 per GB so for me its cheap

Thank you. Very helpful.

Here in Chile, today, Starlink Chile is offering a maritime plan worth Ch$257,411 (Chilean peso) per month, that is, US$320.21, with equipment worth Ch$2,536,000, which is equivalent to US$3,153.84.

Switch on/off billing is simple, Starlink made it when you switch on, it converts your entire month to the new plan for the month, even if you turn it off.

Hey Tim, thanks for your quick response to this recent news. Always appreciated. Cheers.

A few things... it doesn't cost Starlink anything more to operate over water than it does to operate over land. The satellites are not stationary, so they all travel over water to create the constellation that they have now. When the satellites travel over water, they are simply not getting used as much as the ones that are over land. From a financial perspective, they would want more people using the ones over water more often since it allowed them to reduce their operations costs. As far as data goes, 50GB per month is more than enough for the average user. That would equate to roughly 60 hours of Netflix watching or 2 hours per day. When we lived in the RV (family of 4), we used about 65GB per month and that was with me working a full-time job where I was online for 8 hours per day and our children attended online school classes.

Launching a single satellite into space can cost anywhere between $10 million and $400 million, depending on the vehicle used. A small launch vehicle such as the Pegasus XL rocket can lift 976 pounds (443 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit for about $13.5 million. That works out to be almost $14,000 per pound.

The biggest reason for the starlink changes ,, is that us boaters found a great loophole and had the world, but instead of staying quiet they went shouting and bragging on every media N.a. na na , and here we are , the secret is out and the loophole will close,

You are doing an amazing job, keeping us informed, especially about Starlink.

Correction, it does not cost them any extra to service oceans because of the style of satellite being used. Geostationary satellite such as viasat do cost more to service the ocean because they have a cone of service that has to be directed at an area to supply service. SpaceX satellites are in LEO which means they have to cross the ocean anyway to service land based customers. They only charge more because they can charge more.

People outside of the USA often don't realise that they have no legal protection against Starlink, whereas if they used a local service their own country laws would/may offer some protection. For example UK, Australia or New Zealand have fantastic consumer protection laws as well as misleading advertising protection laws, unlike the USA.

I think the land-based Roam plan is all non-priority. The new plan gets you the certain amount of priority internet. When that runs out it goes ack to the same speed you get from Roam. I would think unless you are moored near a city, you won't notice much of a speed drop because traffic will be low. I don't have it so I could be wrong. But I am looking to pick it up soon and will get the $250/mo plan. We still work from the boat and it is worth the cost to us at this time.

One of the problems not mentioned here is ground stations. Satellites require ground stations to function. Until there is a heavy saturation of inter-satellite links (laser), data must be transferred via (legacy) radios from sat to sat until there is a sat with a viable ground station link. Since there are no ground stations in the middle of the ocean, this makes it very hard to predict throughput/load/bandwidth/etc throughout the system, possibly degrading service for people that are using the service according to the agreed terms.

We used to use iridium in The antarctic those plans were something like 5k a month for 10gigs 250$ sounds like a bargain

Starlink sats are in low earth orbit (LEO) which means they orbit faster than the earth rotates in order to stay up in orbit (generally about 30,000 km/h) - as opposed to geosynchronous orbit (such as most television and communications satellites) which orbit at the same speed that earth rotates (roughly 18,500 km/h). What this means is that they need more satellites, moving at faster speeds in order to make sure that you always have satellite coverage. Also, the lower down a satellite is, the smaller its coverage area, again necessitating more satellites. Priority for the early satellites was for the orbits that would cover high population densities, however now as they complete the network, the lower densities are also being filled in - remember this is Starlink’s main competitive advantage that they cover areas that are not well served by high speed Internet (let alone affordable broadband). All of this is to say that your analysis at 8:55 is a little bit off - there is actually no additional incremental cost to Starlink for the offshore coverage since the satellites must move through those areas of spares population regardless as they orbit in LEO. What is different is that Starlink has competition from those lower cost options that you mentioned via cellular networks for land-based customers. Furthermore, Starlink could make agreements with those cell providers and make use of a hybrid cellular/satellite configuration in order to achieve max speeds while reducing traffic on the space segment of the network. So all that to say that the only differences between at-sea and near-shore or onshore is competition and that at-sea customers are more willing to pay more because of fewer options - both things that you touched on. And totally agree that this absolutely mirrors the cell phone wars of the late 90s and early 2000s.

The reason why Starlink is doing that is that their satellite mesh is fed the data by ground stations. They cannot have any ground stations in the ocean, so getting the data there requires many more hops between satellites and loads the mesh significantly more than a typical ground usage. (The low earth orbit satellites are always orbiting at high speed, so there are no satellites above a certain location permanently.)

if you do business from your boat, should be able to deduct cost as a business expense.

.... Wired describes the lifecycle of a platform..... "Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." The comparison to mobile phone companies will only be valid once there is significant competition. For our use that means Satellite Data aimed at recreational boaters. Once that comes, it is just a commodity where price competition drives the purchasing decision. I'm just afraid that may be quite a few years out.

I know the $250 a month for only 220MBps seems expensive to folks who have gotten used to sub $100 per month Gigabit terrestrial broadband in urban areas. But sailors at sea have been paying around $100 per month for Iridium Go service that has a 2.4 kbps (no that's not a typo) data rate that reminds me of my childhood CompuServe dial up. I think sooner rather than later, Starlink will treat RV's and Sailboats the same and allow the RV service to be used within a couple miles of the coast as long as they are "stationary", meaning anchored or in a marina. The easiest way to do it would just be to geofence the unit when you power it on with a rule that says something like, "the service works only within 250 meters of the powerup location". Just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Thanks for this timely video. I was planning on getting Starlink (thinking it was to be at $130/mo) in just a few months. Well done.

I Heard Starlink's Satellites Cover the Planet, It's Just Some Aren't Active. You May Be 100 Miles from Cook Islands, and There Are Sats Up There, but Not Active Because No Customers. If You're in Shipping Lanes, You May Get Better Prices, Internet Speeds. Yadda, Yadda...Now, I'm Just Rambling. Great Video!!

Land Starlink subscriber here. Musk's MO is big promises but failure to follow through. I was an early beta adopter, and at first, my download speeds were 200Mbps. And then things gradually slowed down. I searched on the Internet, and found others subscribers had a similar experience. The reason was simple: Starlink was rapidly signing up new subscribers, but it failed to keep pace by launching more and more satellites. And there is really no excuse here: Musk owns the space company employed to send the satellites into space. So my speeds are all over the road now. Though I live in rural CO, I am fortunate that the state provided funds for fiber optic cable for my neighborhood. Before the end of this year, it will be good riddance to Starlink, and hello to fiber optic. The 200 Mbps fiber optic plan is only 60.00 per month -- half what I am paying Starlink now.

Tim, beware turning your dish on/off. If you 'land' in a country where service isn't offered, you might not reconnect.

Over 70% of Earth's surface is water. That means those satellites doing next to nothing. What are they worried about? It isn't like they'll be that busy in the middle of any ocean.

As a kid I watched startrek and and wished I had a communicator and when the motorola startac 3000 dropped in the 90s i said to my mate look this is literally the startrek communicator from 15 years ago and we just both sat there spinning out that what we watched as kids is now a reality, now i look at today and see the replicators as 3d printers from digital to physical in minutes, i cant wait to see where we will be in 50 years, BEAM ME UP SCOTTY!!!

what you call early days of cell plans is pretty much the modern setup in australia lol

Very good perspective

On the satellite coverage of starlink ... no. Starlink is contellations of leo sattelites that basically fly across the sky in formation. The dish is actually a phased array antenna that can track and steer the beam to multiple sattelites near simultaineously ... as one sat begins to pass out of view the next sat in view becomes active. In a maritime environment the signal has to be crosslinked from satellite to satellite until it gets a sat in view of a NOC ... could be 2 hops, could be 10. There are near impercetable breaks in the data stream, vpn services don't like it and often drop. All of these extra crosslinks do have a monetary value for starlink. Most boaters are using either the RV or Business antenna, which arent really designed for marine use, the roll, pitch and yaw of a boat will excessively wear the tiny stepping motors. With US DoD and many commercial shipping companies contracting Starlink services i suspect they are going to be a bit more draconian in enforcing the terms of service so they can more accurately determine what bandwidth they can guarantee to those contracts. As it is, many boaters are intentionally and willfully breaking the terms of service which they agreed to and are now angry Starlink has finally had enough ... Havent seen the approvals for amazons service ... Also ... no I dont work for Elon ... but I am a communications manager for a very large shipping company.

The one thing not mentioned, the inter satellite links are not established in a meaningful way, so the down link is a possible bandwidth limiting issue. No ground stations out there so everyone is sharing the limited available downlinks.

Besides wanting to get more money out of wealthier customers, there's also the issue that on land, the satellite you use will connect directly to a nearby ground station. On the ocean, multiple satellites are needed to route you to a ground station.

Thank you. This is the best explanation I have seen yet!

👍🏼glad to see you back

Very well presented Sir. Competition not only brings price reduction,it creates new business,ideas,technology,etc.

Hope all is well. I'd help if iI could. And yes, starlink's new plans do sound like the early days of cellular.

For what the product offers, IMO 250$ is cheap. But as this technologies matures prices will go down

For the sake of being correct, for Starlink it doesn't matter if a station is landbased or movable. The costs are the same. That satélite has to pass everything anyway and is already up there. It's just cashing in to the situation for Starlink.

250 a month for high speed internet on the ocean is a steal. The maritime option prior to this was like 5-10k month and the fact they knowingly let folks use residential on ocean was just a gift to the cruising community. 50G limit with 100 month for every 50G after that is reasonable. My recommendation: starlink while in ocean or on hook without cell and use your cell when you have coverage.

Let's buy a boat & escape from this mad world. "Only if we can have Starlink". Hello.

When is go my first cell ph in New Zealand the calls cost $.70c/min a txt was $.70c and monthly plan was $70. The ph system cost $16000… you had to order it and wait for the call on the land line to come in and pick it up.. tot was a big deal in the telecom office and people would clap as the deal was done…. Saying that it made me hide money in the marine fishing industry… I could call thru with problems and order stores and fuel and trucks to unload fish for the export market. Things continue to get better all the time .

There is also a french one that is being trialled atm. I am not sure atm if it will be full internet connection or just access to weather associated items. Either way it is another choice. 😃

Great explanation. I'm grizzly enough to remember very early cell days. We are on a journey no doubt.

my first cell phone that i used was provided by my employer ,it was the size of a car battery and cost about £1.00 a minute to use ,that was about 40 years ago , now look at what you can get on an unlimited plan, Starlink has different charges world wide , i believe its $50.00 in the Phillipines ,Its £70.00 here in the Uk and $150.00 in the US per month

When you switch plans you have to wait out the rest of your billing cycle to switch back in most cases. That's what I've heard...so you can't just switch willy nilly whenever you want without a penalty period...I think there might be an internal tier system to that governs how quickly you can switch.

Thanks!

250.00 smackers and there's cap FOGETABOUTIT! Great vid btw, thanx.

Thanks Tim, really relevant commentary

Sat count does not justify cost increase for most oceanic areas. These sats are not geostationary because they are very low orbit, thus you need a constellation of sats with orbit trajectories all over the globe, hence covering most of the oceans.

Please consider doing a video on sailboats for tall folks. 6' 5" and good luck finding a boat with headroom and a berth long enough to sleep well in. Thanks.

I was under the impression that the small dishy is NOT authorized for in motion use. Regardless if you change your plan.

Starlink is shooting itself in the foot for the needless extortion of sailors.

I remember when going on a sailboat meant getting away from the internet.

You can't really say it costs more for starlink at sea because they cover more people over land and not at sea. The satellites are in orbit. They don't have a choice of whether to cover the ocean or not. If they want to cover land, then the satellites will a few minutes later be over the ocean. What it does do, is it requires the satellites to relay signals from satellite to satellite to get to a ground station. Normally on land, you go through up to a satellite, then down to a ground station. At sea, they may have to relay you 1/4 of the way around the planet before the packets get to a ground station.

The satellite costs does not vary with coverage for LEO constelations, like Starlink, Iridium & O3B. The network must be global to provide local coverage. The only potential issue is that the first generation Starlink satellite have to up and down link vthrough a single satellite. So the ground station has to be able to communicate to the same satellite that you are. Ok for coastal but not oceanic. For Geostationary satellites, like Inmatsat and Viasat these are regional/local.

“For them to find a singular billing practice” Intentional reference to ATT Cingular? Lol

There is a specific package for ships and a lot of sailors are using the mobile base station indented for campers. I'm sure there is some opportunistic pricing going on here on the part of Starlink but this isn't just that. TCP packets ping back and forth, when the packet fails or you fail to get a confirmation, the internet keeps sending it over and over again. So using the wrong service causes more packet problems and you are resending again and again and clogging up the entire network. The sailing package prices in the extra bandwidth you use, and the hardware adjusts faster to reduce the package loss. So again, they may be gouging you on the cruising plan but there is something real behind it all.

Being on the ocean requires use of the new V2 Starlink satellite which can communicate sat-2-sat via laser. There are not very many of these launched yet. So service is limited. Near shore the v1 says can directly communicate with ground. I doubt these expensive rates will last more than a few years.

I’m a civil engineer and my first job out of college (late 1990’s) was building cell phone sites in the NYC metro area. This was back when they charged $0.35 per minute. There was a cell site in lower Manhattan making $250,000 in revenue PER MONTH! You couldn’t build the sites fast enough for the carriers. They didn’t care what it cost just get it done.

That was really a great explanation. Thanks. Send it to all the macro econ teachers you know. It's all in there: supply and demand, elasticity of demand, competition, fixed costs, variable costs, monopoly power, government regulations, and of course avarice. And much more. Oh, also the historical perspective, And maybe send it to the engineering. Heck, put the whole thing on the internet. Oh, yeh. It is. Never mind.

I don't think it costs starlink much more for maritime coverage because the satellites are set in their orbits anyway giving coverage. What differs is the competition : what else is available on the sea vs on land - other satellite coverage is also expensive...

The cost of supporting ocean service where your satellite cannot reach a ground station is incredibly high, that's why you get charged more for it. I wouldn't assume that amazon will be successful launching a LEO constellation.

The cell phone analogy is spot on. We are in the wild-west of satellite pricing. When the European and Chinese competing satellites go up, it’s going to be quite interesting. There are so many rabbit holes to go down but, I will agree with @tyvandm about one thing: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites could offer coverage across almost the entire sailable area of the globe. In fact, service over the ocean would be clearer because there are no obstructions across the entire horizon. Additionally, because the density of users in the middle of the ocean is so low, service would be quite fast. It wouldn’t cost the internet service provider anything extra to provide service across the entire ocean because the satellites are already there. Like with cell phones, the end product is going toward cell phones and iPads equipped with satellite connections at the price of something just above regular cell-phone service. Land service will be made moot, just as most people no longer own true copper landline POTS telephones. Amazon Kindle readers came with free 3G and no ads if you bought the most expensive machine. Of course that’s deprecated now, but for a while it was a thing. It’s likely a decade from now there will be some bottom-dollar machine with similar satellite service that will allow you to text, email or browse regardless of your global position. Love watching your channel and hearing your excellent perspectives. Stay safe out there!

I got that email.... I'm a TRUCK DRIVER. I couldn't sail anywhere if i wanted to!

Great job, good insite.

Love the videos - I could be wrong, however my understanding is that because Starlinks satellite network is a gigantic mesh of eventually thousands of satellites - this means that their hexagon coverage is always global. So, in theory, unless Starlink factored in a "cool down" phase when their boxes are flying out of coverage of land , across giant stretches of the ocean - and this logistically affects them ( I doubt it) - then logically the cost of full ocean coverage ought to be fully free, or very very very cheap for starlink to provide. The network is going to be flying over the oceans anyways, and due to the lower altitude of the network compared to older satellites like dish, it means they will be working - with no clients to service. You would think that starlink would want to get whatever $$ they can get out of the coverage they are providing, but some idiot in Corp billing probably equates boat = rich people, so charge atleast double. This move definitely reeks of the early cell phone days, and might unfortunately increase since there really is not going to be a competitor with Starlink for a long while. The closest is OneWeb - the UK version of Starlink, but that is very limited as there are international agreements for who has coverage over what spot and what altitudes.

Sometimes it makes sense to be unplugged. I know that people need the internet for work but I appreciate moments when I don't have access to the web.

That's not entirely correct.. You don't have to power down your starlink when you go sailing... once you leave hexagonal zone of land your internet will just stop working and then you'll have a choice to opt-in for the mobile priority at $2/Gb that works on ocean. And yes, even when your internet stops working, you can access your account page to do that change.. Then when you get back in the land zone you opt-out and problem solved... That's very reasonable approach! Most of the cruisers spend a lot of time on anchor pretty close to land anyways, which is in land zone per starlink map. instead of getting maritime plan you just pay for what you use. On top of that, they don't charge you for any updates and location data starlink uploads/downloads while connected in motion. This is the best result of breaking their T&C we could get.. They don't want to block us, they would lose tons of subscribers, what would be the point of that?!

I see that Delos is crossing the Pacific and has been posting, I think with Starlink. I wonder which plan they are using. The Viasat system they were using was removed because it doesn't cover the Pacific. I think the cost of the Viasat was $5,000/month, if you had to pay the fee.

Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit, so they transit the oceans whether or not there are customers there. It doesn't cost Starlink any extra to service customers at sea.

I love how Canadian the “I’m soarry was”

Sending good vibes your way, I have some heavy personal stuff going on as well and taking some time out for yourself is necessary & good. I had heard about the Starlink Kerfuffle..good video :) ..I remember the early days of cell phones "oh, you want to have a dial tone? That will be extra...text messages???? whooooowheeeeeeee, sign this loan application"

Great analysis

Great work Tim thanks :)

Compared to cable internet, it is reasonable. I plan to add it to my (new to me) Oceanis 45 for cruising.

I think you need to compare it to the satellite mega Yacht prices and services. And you can see why starlink is raising prices to be similar. Why would they want to give it away

Yeah nah on the Starlink. $250/mth is crazy. Thought about it for the yacht but maybe better off without the distractions, potentially the only ad-free place on the planet.

I remember getting a $25,000 cell phone bill once while on the first ever unlimited plan, lol. Wonder how long before a family forgets to turn off their dish and the kids blow through a few terabytes at $2/gig?

That's not too bad! Yes it's expensive! But there are options that can be enabled/ changed anytime. I don't see an issue other than the massive price for the mobile usage option. I do look forward to Starlink dropping in price and see the massive use to sailors!