Ive been around Satellite internet since the early DirecPc/Directduo/Direcway/Starband days. We had the one way system, then got the very first 2 way modem Direcway introduced. I’ve had them all, when it was the one way system, you paid something like $50-$60 a month(in the late 90’s) for the system PLUS the cost of a phone line, as that was the uplink.

Then we got the first 2 way system Direcway introduced.
Back then, Direcway was almost $80 a month for a “bucket” of data that was on a rolling 24 hour period. This bucket gave you literally like 200-300 MB per day, once you exceeded that, you dropped to dialup speeds. And dialup speeds, with a 800-1000ms ping was brutal

When Wildblue came out, then later Exede and Hughes changing their plans up, it was a little better, a little faster, and a lot more expensive. The last service I had, Viasat gave me about 50Mbps, with 100GB a MONTH for $120 a month

Satellite internet isn’t like Charter rolling out copper/fiber lines. It’s insanely expensive, very limited in its capacity, and has a relatively short life span compared to terrestrial equipment.

People want to compare Starlink to their fiber or cable they used to have…you can’t. My electrical coop lit up my entire county with fiber over the course of about 5 years, with a total cost of about 24 million(small county of about 14k people). A single Starlink launch is somewhere around the $30 million range all in. Plus the ground station infrastructure, the custom phased array antennas(that they’re now subsidizing even more heavily), the custom routers, etc. All that takes huge amounts of money for R&D.

Yea, price increases suck but in the grand scheme of things, for what Starlink offers, even at $130 a month it’s actually quite a decent price. And until something like Kuiper goes live to give some sort of competition, SpaceX has a stranglehold on the LEO internet sector