Starlink Maritime
Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they&#x27;re in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere:<p>A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5&#x2F;megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!<p><pre><code>  SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90&#x2F;mo
  SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00&#x2F;mo
  SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00&#x2F;mo
</code></pre>
Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They&#x27;re offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don&#x27;t see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they&#x27;re making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship&#x27;s gyrocompass.<p>But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it&#x27;s interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it&#x27;d have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that&#x27;d be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they&#x27;re charging actually doesn&#x27;t even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it&#x27;ll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil&#x2F;gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren&#x27;t deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.<p>Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).