Is there any benefit, from Starlink’s perspective for them to sell ‘reseller kits’ for a single ground based antenna to serve a neighborhood? Or are Starlink’s radios so efficient that it doesn’t really matter?
Also, I wonder why Starlink wouldn’t have more demand-based pricing based on consumption? With a very finite service window at least for the next 10 years, seems like each allotment of time talking to a satellite is worth a highly variable amount depending on its location.
>Is there any benefit, from Starlink’s perspective for them to sell ‘reseller kits’ for a single ground based antenna to serve a neighborhood? Or are Starlink’s radios so efficient that it doesn’t really matter?
I think their antennas can go to half a gigabit or maybe even higher, but in practice the speed will be limited by how many customers are served by each satellite. You can see some medians like 80-120 Mbps[0]. Also seemingly there's an option to buy a big "Starlink gateway" with speeds like 10 Gbps[1] - that could be nice for small ISPs.
>Also, I wonder why Starlink wouldn’t have more demand-based pricing based on consumption? With a very finite service window at least for the next 10 years, seems like each allotment of time talking to a satellite is worth a highly variable amount depending on its location.
What do you mean by "very finite service window at least for the next 10 years"? Starlink satellites are designed with a lifespan of 5 years, so every Starlink sat that is now in the sky will be replaced by a new sat relatively soon (surely by an improved model). There are more Starlinks in the sky each week, the sats launched today are more powerful than older sats, and Starship will be launching even bigger sats for less money.
Right now the prices vary by country (120 USD in USA, 80 USD in Poland, 50 USD in Zimbabwe), and they have "regional savings"[2] and "congestion charges"[3] in specific areas. Anyway, cities aren't really a market for Starlink (too many customers per satellite, so there can't be many customers per capita, and it's expensive so no one would buy it if it was even more expensive), only in moderately populated areas Starlink starts making any business sense, but there's still competition from other ISPs, so prices can't be very high. In sparsely populated areas, you have all the bandwidth, but customers may not have any alternatives, so there's no reason to have very low prices even where the demand is very low. For ships the price is 250 USD, because the only alternative is another satellite service, but much slower than Starlink.
The business plans have some amount of data that has priority - I see on the website that it's 2TB/month for $500/month, and after that there's unlimited non-priority data. So on the busy day the business with priority data would have good speeds, while others would have slow speeds. It's just like controlling how much time is allocated by the satellite for transmissions to business users. I think all the satellites provide service for all users, but they differ in bandwidth (older sats have less), and additional capabilities - some sats have laser satellite-to-satellite links that allow Starlink to have connection even in places where there's no ground station nearby (like in the middle of the ocean), and some sats have "direct to cell" antennas that will provide low-speed LTE connection to regular smartphones (that's not available yet, but will be next year).
Also, I wonder why Starlink wouldn’t have more demand-based pricing based on consumption? With a very finite service window at least for the next 10 years, seems like each allotment of time talking to a satellite is worth a highly variable amount depending on its location.