SpaceX Starlink Public Beta Begins: It's $99 a Month Plus $499 Up Front
Freeman writes:
SpaceX has begun sending email invitations to Starlink's public beta and will charge beta users $99 per month plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. The emails are being sent to people who previously registered interest in the service on the Starlink website. One person in Washington state who got the email posted it on Reddit. Another person who lives in Wisconsin got the Starlink public-beta invitation and passed the details along to Ars via email.
SpaceX is calling it the "Better Than Nothing" beta, perhaps partly because the Starlink satellite service will be most useful to people who cannot get cable or fiber broadband. But the email also says, "As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations."
[...] SpaceX has said it will reach "near global coverage of the populated world by 2021."
[There are reports of additional expenses for taxes, ridgeline mount, and shipping. --martyb]
That's a bit higher than I'd hoped, but still doable. That's 50% more expensive than what I'm paying for point-to-point wireless for about 5X or better speed than what I am getting. Also, those are really nice latencies. My point-to-point wireless service has worse latency than that.
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