Starlink is such a scam all my relatives signed up for the $600 beta and now more than a year later still no way to use the service. All the while they keep promising it's only 1-2 months out.
Admittedly, frontloading the deposit to determine market interest and where to scale with actual dollars is a bit scummy (see: Cybertruck/Model S/3/X/Y/everything Tesla does deposits) but the service IS live in a lot of markets and DOES have real, actual users. Calling it a "scam" implies that those things aren't true.
But I agree that Elon time is absurd and irritating and sure feels like a scam. (I would argue FSD being sold for SIX GODDAMN YEARS on Teslas is _absolutely_ a scam.)
Received mine this week for a service address on the Navajo Nation. I imagine the wait is shorter for less populated rural areas, which should correlate with need. My old isp charged $60 a month for 1.5 Mb/s down and 750kb/s up. This should be a great improvement.
My relatives are in a similar situation -- only satellite available in their area, so ~800ms latency and speeds around 1 MBps, but half a mile away there is literally fiber available, so it's going to be a long time before it gets opened up for them because they aren't considered to be in an underserved area.
I've been on it since February of last year. My day job uses a remote desktop and I'm on video conference calls 4+hrs a day. Starlink was unusable until late summer because I would see 50+ outages of 3 seconds or more during the day. (3 second blips are where it seems to really interrupt zoom and vdi)
It really started coming together in the fall and I would say since November it has been very usable. I would say it's easily as stable if not more stable than the 10/.7M dsl it replaces.
This is exactly my experience. Also got it last January or February. I had to keep my DSL line for a few months, but it got good enough for me to finally drop that thing.
The issues I have with connectivity are probably 99% trees.
When I first started it seemed to need a total view of the sky to get consistent. As the software/flotilla have improved vastly, I use it for zoom and once every couple hours of zooming I may risk a 10 second blip.
I think they are getting better software wise of detecting the usable area of visible sky and utilizing satellites better.
I would think more satellites, more tree tolerance. I currently have my dishy too close to the road since I get the best view that way, I might try moving it back to the backyard this spring to see if it can work well there without worrying about teenagers using it for batting practice or some disgruntled cable employee or it getting stolen.
If you have an unobstructed view of the sky, it should be functionally as reliable as cable internet.
My company is currently using a Starlink as the primary internet connection (with vdsl backup) for a new office we’re setting up in australia. It works great, consistent 300mbps with peaks up to 500. Anecdotally, the system is working great for us and is actually more reliable than the vdsl connection we use as the failover.
Only 200k happy customers when it was promised to be "fully live, nationwide, for all customers" next month more than a year ago with repeated similar promises this fall.
And my relatives are not wealthy people -- this was half of their income for a particular month so at this point they'll be damned if they lose their place in line. They have no other choice -- not even DSL options in their area and the other satellite services have been so expensive and unreliable. They are completely at his mercy, and I feel like it's my fault for suggesting it.
You're defining "happy" as "not quite pissed off enough to leave". That's exactly the kind of game which (when compounded) makes fed-up people call things scams.
I assume they run the gamut from maximally happy, to whatever their threshold for leaving is. Which is why I used a tautological descriptor.
You're taking a plausibly-most-likely scenario and using it to cast an assumption about the emotional state of hundreds of thousands of people. Don't you think you might be talking out of your ass?
"happy" would be "yes, I'd use this in favor of fiber". No satellite customer is truly happy, no matter how good the product is, unless they are on a boat or truck.
I know people who have had the service for months, outside the US, and are happy with it. How can it be a scam? Why didn't they ask for a refund? Was the refund denied or slow to arrive?
I suspect the original comment is referring to Starlink taking a (~ 15% deposit) and 'promising' 1-2 months wait time which isn't reducing so they end up still waiting 6 months later, and the expected delivery is still reported as 1-2 months in the Starlink account.
It's possible that the delay is due to lack of legal clearance in the customer country. Starlink needs to get approval to install and operate the ground station satellite links in each country. From the few authoritative statements I've seen those are sometimes delayed due to local country bureaucracy.
I ordered Starlink in the UK in February 2020 and the equipment finally arrived in May 2020. I /think/ the stated delivery estimate at the time was 2-3 months and never reduced until the order confirmation email arrived and I paid the balance, after which the equipment arrived a couple of weeks later.
They're selling pre-orders in several countries where they almost certainly won't launch at all, or won't launch for a long time, due to huge regulatory hurdles. It does seem a bit like the same scummy behaviour as airlines still selling tickets for flights that definitely will not operate, thus getting cashflow for the period between sale and refund (which can be many months), as well as real profit from the people who don't bother to request a refund.
For example, Starlink claimed in early 2021 to be launching in Viet Nam "within a year", and have been selling pre-orders, but they can't legally operate in VN unless they form a JV with a local partner, since foreign companies aren't allowed to provide telecoms services there. The relevant government agency went on record saying that Starlink hasn't even applied for permission, yet they're still selling pre-orders.
I agree about the needless misleading of expectations. Some, but not all, is - I suspect - well-meaning public sharing of ambitions based on most favourable ideal timelines - something very common across most Musk-led businesses. I usually read that stuff as a partial sharing of stream-of-consciousness ideas and targets before there's a fully formed plan of execution - where reality often imposes impediments!
In your Viet Nam scenario and similar cases I wonder if it is (partially) a result of the Starlink plan to use direct satellite to satellite LASER links to relay data in low earth orbit to a more remote existing ground station?
As in, if I recall correctly, SpaceX originally expected to be launching 'block 2' satellites with LASER links in mid 2021 but suffered internal hidden delays (that led to Musk's internal SpaceX existential warning in October 2021 and firing of some senior staff) so the first batch were only recently launched in early 2022.
Those LASER links being in place are likely a prerequisite for serving territories where SpaceX cannot obtain favourable permissions for ground stations.
I don't think SpaceX will actually do this. They'd be explicitly breaking the law in those countries by providing services to people there (the mere fact that there is a technical means to do so without installing a local ground station doesn't change that). In several countries (I think including Viet Nam) it's illegal to even own an unlicensed satellite terminal, so the users would be at risk too.
If you order something online with estimated delivery "in a few weeks" and a year later it still isn't here, it's a scam, regardless of how easy it is to get refunded.
