No plan for Starlink tiered internet pricing

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell doesn’t think the company will add “tiered pricing” to its Starlink satellite Internet service, which is currently offered for $ 99 a month with limited early access.

“I don’t think we will offer tiered prices to consumers. We will try to keep this as simple and transparent as possible. Therefore, there are currently no plans to tier consumers,” said Shotwell, speaking on Tuesday the Satellite 2021 “LEO Digital Forum” on a virtual panel.

In a tiered price system, the customer’s payment is based on the service level selected by them.

Starlink is the company’s capital-intensive project Building an interconnected Internet network with thousands of satellites, known in the aerospace industry as a Constellation, designed to provide high speed Internet to consumers around the world.

The company has put more than 1,200 satellites into orbit to date.

In October, SpaceX began rolling out the early Starlink service in a public beta that now extends to Customers in the USA, Canada, UK., Germany and New Zealand – with a service price of $ 99 per month in the US, in addition to the upfront cost of the equipment needed to connect to the satellites.

Elon Musk’s The company has continued to expand Starlink’s service with the company public beta with more than 10,000 users in the first three months. Shotwell noted that SpaceX does not have a “timeframe to exit beta” and that the company still “has a lot of work to do to make the network reliable”.

Musk’s company plans to expand Starlink beyond its own four walls and is asking the FCC to do so Extension of the connectivity authorization to “moving vehicles” The service could be used by airplanes and ships to large trucks.

Currently, SpaceX is focused on serving customers in rural and hard-to-reach areas. According to Shotwell, Starlink can “serve every rural household in the US” or “around 60 million people.” While SpaceX is expanding service to other countries, SpaceX is initially focusing on the US, according to Shotwell, “because they speak English and are nearby and if they have a problem with their court we can have one delivered quickly.”

“But we definitely want to expand this capability beyond the US and Canada,” added Shotwell.

That means SpaceX pays about two-thirds of the cost of the terminals, as the company bills beta customers up front $ 499 for a user terminal. Musk said that earlier this year Starlink “needs to bridge a deep negative cash flow gap” A significant part of this is expected to be due to the cost of the user terminals.

While SpaceX has not yet billed customers for the full cost of the terminals, the company expects the costs to drop to “a few hundred dollars” in the next year or two, according to Shotwell.

Shotwell reiterated earlier comments by the SpaceX leadership that Starlink does not want to replace the service of “giant providers” AT & T., Comcastetc., “as she noted, the satellite internet” is very free to the services they offer “.

“The Starlink system is best suited for highly dispersed rural or semi-rural populations,” said Shotwell.

Meanwhile, Shotwell said SpaceX’s challenge is to learn how to scale for consumer customers while “making sure we can build a reliable network”. But she added that none of these challenges were “that we cannot solve”.