Musk’s Starlink Socks Customers With $1500 ‘High Demand’ Surcharge
from the thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another dept
For years I’ve noted that while Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband system can be very useful for people with no other options (warzones, RVs, boats, rural Americans), the network has struggled to maintain performance as it grows into more mainstream markets, resulting in not only widespread slowdowns, but also the company socking users with massive “congestion surcharges.”
These surcharges are actively designed to deter use because the network is struggling to handle the load. They started at around $100 a few years ago, then jumped to $750. And last week, Reddit users began complaining that they were automatically hit with a $1500 demand surcharge. And because Musk’s companies historically don’t invest in customer service, calling up to complain doesn’t really help:
“I have been charged 1500 dollars demand surcharge for simply verifying my address that I have subscribe to 3 years ago. I have contacted starlink customer support but it’s pretty worthless. I have been getting tossed from one agent to another agent for the past 5 days.”
Last year, a study from researchers at X-Lab quietly showed that Starlink struggles to manage the load as the network grows, making it ill-suited as serious game changer for U.S. access. So as the network scales up, Starlink will be forced to impose more and more limits and restrictions on usage to ensure that most people have an acceptable experience. The laws of physics are kind of annoying like that.
That a niche broadband option gets congestion normally wouldn’t be that big of a deal; the problem is Trump Republicans have hijacked and retooled the $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program to throw billions of dollars — and millions of new customers — at Musk’s Starlink as a personal favor to one of the U.S. president’s biggest donors.
Ideally, sensible U.S. broadband policy involves pushing fiber optic cable as deeply into American communities as possible, then covering a lot of the remainder with either fixed wireless or cellular tech. Only then can low-Earth orbit satellite broadband options like Starlink (or Amazon’s Leo) act as niche options that fill in the gaps.
These technologies were never really designed to be the primary avenue for broadband delivery across the bandwidth-hungry country. They’re simply not useful in many more densely populated areas. But the Trump extended infotainment universe is convinced that Starlink is akin to some kind of magic simply because Musk’s name is involved.
So they’re redirecting billions of taxpayer dollars away from better, higher-capacity fiber options and toward Musk’s Starlink, which is only going to result in greater congestion as the network begins to strain under the heavily subsidized load. People will only start to figure this out long after Musk has pocketed billions of dollars in subsidies in exchange for Starlink service SpaceX already planned to deploy.
I’ll repeat that because it gets missed: Musk is getting billions in subsidies, which he professes to hate, in exchange for doing nothing differently. Extremely innovative.
There’s been an additional layer of stupidity created by the SpaceX IPO and its utterly bogus proclaimed valuations. The prospectus pretends that Starlink will somehow magically scale from 10 million current subscribers to more than 300 million in very short order with no headaches, but reality and the laws of physics are going to have something very different in mind.
And again (just like Tesla Solar), because Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent, folks shoveled toward Starlink by the Trump administration aren’t going to have a good time. This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink has also been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer, and is generally too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access.
That’s not to say that services like Starlink don’t have very real uses, but the company and its tech (like everything Musk touches) is being wildly misrepresented in a way that’s going to become increasingly and problematically apparent in the next few years.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, congestion, demand surcharge, elon musk, internet access, low earth orbit, satellite, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink
Comments on “Musk’s Starlink Socks Customers With $1500 ‘High Demand’ Surcharge”
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Musk really needs to hurry forward to the shooting himself in a bunker phase. Move fast and break yourself, Elon.
At the risk of repeating myself...
…one of the many reasons that Starlink is overloaded is that it’s completely overrun by abusers. I see constant attacks directed against HTTP, SMTP, DNS, SSH, POP, IMAP, and even FTP — I set up a dummy server out of morbid curiosity and sure enough, it’s being hammered.
As far as I can tell, nobody at Starlink cares. Nobody at Starlink is paying attention. I’m not even sure that there are any actual people there, other than some low-level employees who don’t know anything and can’t do anything.
So as a last resort I’ve been adding Starlink’s network allocations to my firewall rulesets, blocking them from email, web sites, etc. This is a fair amount of work, so I’m unlikely to remove those any time soon, and certainly not before Starlink takes effective network-wide action to solve the problem(s).
I’m not the only one doing this. So not only are Starlink customers being gouged for substandard service, but they’re steadily losing access to chunks of the Internet because of the rampant incompetence of Starlink personnel.
Re: That Considering
That someone update those Tin cans in LEO. Do you think they sent up REAL servers? or Just Pass thru Routers?
These things are Thrown up there and Fall back to earth with very little control for Impact in the S. Pacific area.
At least the old/newer TV Sat systems. yes the Old ones are still up there, and hackable.
Now that SpaceX’s share is lower (~$145) than when introduced (and keep plunging), and banks and funds are emitting a “serious sell” signal, the company must come with real innovations, not empty promises.
So yes price hikes is no innovations, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be the worse ideas.
No, it’s not “because” of that. Even a company with a very good customer service department isn’t likely to reverse a $1500 charge simply because a customer asks. But they’re likely both a symptom of the company not caring about customer satisfaction—easy to do when the people using it are known to have no real choice. As the old (fake) phone company commercial goes: “We don’t care. We don’t have to.”
So, when we hear about how Starlink will solve all our Internet connection problems, that’s not just delusion, but also an attempt to preclude competition by tricking gullible consumers. “No need to build your own networks [that is, competition]; Starlink will save you.”
That said, scaling a satellite system like this doesn’t require magic. It requires a level of technological advancement that’s well beyond our current capabilities and possibly even our theoretical engineering knowledge (and, okay, we might be approaching what Arthur C. Clarke called “indistinguishable from magic”). Note this text from the analysis paper: “We assume a beamwidth of 1.5 degrees, which is typical for […] LEO constellations like Starlink” and “as reported in Starlink’s FCC filings.” But that’s not a limitation of physics. We can do much better that 1.5 degrees in a lab; we just don’t know how to do that for millions of full-bandwidth customers at a time from a small, power-efficient satellite. Maybe in a hundred years we will.
Also keep in mind that Musk has about 5 million times the median U.S. wealth ($193,000). By that standard, $1500 is basically nothing; Musk bending over to pick $50,000 off the ground would be roughly equivalent to an ordinary American picking up a penny, which most won’t even bother to do.
gets paid
“Buy my service”
uses service
“No wait, don’t use it!! Just buy it!!”
Re: CAUTION
Novelty ISP. For entertainment* purposes only.
Reality is not whining about disliking Elon
Is there anywhere someone can point to a Contract, Agreement, T&Cs, ToS, etc. that provides for random unannounced charges. Starlink’s Terms of Service and Fair Use Policy do not allow for unannounced overage fees on standard residential plans.
Is there anyone who can point to such charges on an invoice and which indicates on that line item what the extra “thousands of dollars” is for?
This looks like nothing but a rant-excuse. I can’t find evidence to the contrary. Anyone? Buehler?
Re:
Sure. Here are the terms.
It’s not clear that the correct procedures were actually followed. But if they were, would that make anything better?
Yours is a pro-Elon rant
Follow the links in the second paragraph, fanboy.
Most customers are going to stop having an acceptable experience anyway if Starlink keeps growing. The bandwidth is strictly limited by physics, if you keep adding subscribers the bandwidth per subscriber keeps dropping. Add enough subscribers and there’s not enough bandwidth for each one to even initiate connections reliably. At that point nobody gets service at all, and being asked to pay a high subscription fee plus “demand” surcharges to not get service? Not a popular idea.
Re: Physics
Physics isn’t the factor here, it’s technology. For one example, fiber-optics meant one circuit between two points. Then OC carriers and 640 circuits. Then DM, WDM, DWDM. Now passive splitters and GPON.
The physics are the same but our ability to use the resource to deliver more facilities improves. 4-wire T-1s became 2-wire ADSL, VDSL, etc. 2-Wire ISDN is gone. X.25 what?
Starlink can leverage their radios any way they like. Modern SDRs can do amazing things. FSK, QFSK, QAM, oh that list does go on.
You could even go back to the 1980s and 1200 baud modems. Then increase the signals per transition and it’s still 1200 baud but now 4800bps, 9600bps, 19200bps, and “upto” 56Kbps on that same phone line. .. on which we never asked “Can you hear me now.”
StarLink is in its startup mode. One day they’ll up their game in both bw delivery and customer service. The kvetching is irrelevant and wastes our time.
Re: Re:
Considering how long it’s been around and who owns/runs it and all, StarLink should be beyond that mode by now. Saying that shit about a company whose product has effectively been available for seven years and has become the most profitable arm of SpaceX is ridiculous. If it isn’t getting any better in the bandwidth delivery and customer service departments now, why should anyone believe it’s going to get any better in the future when there’s no real incentive for it to improve?
Re: Re: Re:
I find this to be an odd statement. Elon Musk is full of shit in terms of technological predictions (and just “dictions”, I guess—describing what’s realistic now), but 7 years is not a long time for something like this. It took like a century for the telephone to go from a toy for rich people to a way for people to casually talk across the world; and about 40 years for computers to become similarly ubiquitous.
We don’t even have anything in a lab yet that could make a system like Starlink very good in areas with high subscriber density and usage. Nothing in physics seems to prevent it, but for all I know it could take another century of research. In the mean time, fiber’s not standing still, and Musk could actually provide fast Internet access for the entire country that way.
Re: Re: Re:2
It kind of is, though. Much of the underlying technology surrounding StarLink has already been figured out. The system is up and running, and has been for years. And as I noted, it is the most profitable part of SpaceX. And yes, I understand that SpaceX has limitations and all—but that’s less an excuse and more an explanation for why it isn’t more widely adopted. Now it’s coming with even bigger fees that the people who were supposed to be the potential customer base for StarLink will be less likely to afford. If this is how StarLink works in its supposed “startup phase”, what the hell is it going to look like when it stops (allegedly) being a startup and starts being an actual full-scale business?
Re: Re: Re:3
Musk’s view of how Starlink was “supposed” to work is nothing more than fantastical bullshit. A more reasonable leader might have described Starlink’s potential customer base as ships, planes, hikers, ranchers, oil rigs, Antarctic research stations, and the like.
7 years is a long time to be letting someone bamboozle the public and press with false advertising, but a short time to actually find a solution for all the problems of high-subscriber-density satellite-based Internet (especially with no apparent plan). Even solving the engineering problems might not ever lead to a practical and affordable result—like if we needed a hundred million satellites for every human to subscribe with reasonable speeds.
I think these satellite-Internet services will get better as technology advances. In fact, Starlink has done two launches, adding 56 working satellites, since you posted your message. But “better” is a low bar; it doesn’t mean “good enough”.
Re: Re:
No, it’s physics that’s the limiting factor. Look up the Shannon-Hartley theorem, more commonly known as Shannon’s Law, which lets you calculate the maximum data rate possible over a channel with a given bandwidth (width in terms of frequency, not data rate (the two get conflated often)). The maximum rate decreases as signal strength decreases, and Starlink has a low signal strength due to the small size of the satellites.and the relative lack of focus of the uplink signal.
Noise is also an issue. The more noise, the lower the maximum data rate. Other subscribers count as noise, because their signals bleed over into the channel you’re using. With few subscribers in an area you can separate channels by enough to minimize noise, but the more subscribers the more channels you need and the closer you have to pack them to fit them in your allowed frequency range. Which means more interference (noise) and lower data rates. When the noise reaches a certain point the signal gets lost in it and your data rate drops to zero. You can hear this happening in radio transmissions, distant signals are weak and staticy, and that static is simply the noise on the channel becoming audible as it’s amplitude approaches that of the signal.
Re: Re: Re:
This argument (based on physics) is sound, so I don’t mean to discount it. But before they bump into fundamental limits imposed by information theory, they’re going to bump into engineering limits imposed by how the Internet works.
One of those limits is: the backhaul problem. Consider a single Starlink subscriber on a Zoom call. The bits compromising the audio/video/text stream need to move bidirectionally from one of Zoom’s servers to the satellite uplink to the satellite to the ground-based Starlink antenna to the subscriber and vice versa. Now consider 50 people doing it. The problem is that it’s insufficient to just have adequate bandwidth between the satellite and the subscribers, they also need adequate bandwidth between the satellite and Zoom — and by extension, Netflix and YouTube and everything else.
This problem isn’t unique to Starlink: lots of operations face the same issue, and there are various approaches to it depending on topology, budget, etc. What makes it more difficult for Starlink is: satellite. There are limits on many bits/second each of those can throw around, based on computing capacity, power, heat dissipation, etc. — and maximum data rate to/from their uplink.
And addressing this is not as simple as buying a bigger better faster more router, unboxing it, and bolting it into the rack. It’s already clear from user reports that Starlink’s network is struggling badly to keep up in many places — and yet they’re still selling it.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yes and no. There is a strict Shannon limit to the amount of data we can stuff down a 1.5° beam (that being the Starlink Analysis paper’s assumption), given a certain amount of noise.
We could reduce the noise somewhat by cleaning our air, which seems like a good idea but is somehow politically contentious. We could reduce it substantially by removing the air, which I imagine the public would like even less.
But that 1.5° beam width is just engineering, with physics leaving a lot of room for improvement—little of which is known to be part of Starlink’s roadmap, to be fair (they’ll benefit from general advancements in beam precision and steering, but there’s no apparent plan for the amount and speed of research and advancement it’d take to turn Musk’s bullshit into reality).
Re:
So far, we’re hitting engineering limitations and are nowhere near being limited by physics. For example, a laser to the moon can be as little as 6.5 km wide, 385,000 km away. Scaling that to the lowest Starlink satellite-to-Earth altitudes of 340 km would give a beam width under 6 m.
In other words, a satellite could target a beam at one particular house. We have no fucking idea how to scale that up to thousands or millions of houses, nor how to get decent uplink bandwidth. Then again, when people made the 3,000-transistor microprocessors of the 1970s, they had no idea how anyone could ever produce the trillion-transistor chips that exist now. (Nevermind that it’d be silly to wait for a half-century of engineering advancement, given that fiber or maybe decent 5G wireless could be everywhere within a decade—but that’s assuming reasonable governance.)
But, in general, much of U.S. Internet access is already unacceptable (per pre-Trump F.C.C. standards) and unpopular. As the well-known joke goes, one doesn’t need to outrun the bear; one only needs to outrun the other campers. Starlink only has to be slightly less bad than the other options that are actually available.
Re: Re:
And in the few contexts where it is “less bad”, it’s becoming “more expensive”, which is only “better” in the context of whoever is making money off StarLink.
Re: Re: Re:
Realistically, Starlink is less bad than going without the Internet, which in many areas is the “option”. What happens to prices in a monopoly situation? Someone made a board game to explain that in a simple way; but, somehow, almost everyone missed the point.
(Occasionally, there may also be the option of several-megabit DSL, or even dial-up. Which to some people may not be much different than “going without the Internet”, on account of not being usable for the things people actually want to do.)
Re: Re:
The satellite might be able to target a laser that accurately, but how about the return signal from the house? There’s also the complications of putting that many laser emitters on a single satellite, powering them all, and targeting them accurately when you can’t mechanically aim them. Here I’d jump over to the work being done on point-to-point laser data links for orbital use, and that’s in it’s early stages and nowhere near what Starlink would need.
Re: Re: Re:
Well, yes, hence “We have no fucking idea …. how to get decent uplink bandwidth.” But profoundly asymmetric Internet connections are not unheard of; they suck for some things, but can be tolerable for others. And we could hand-wave something about polarization or whatnot, that would allow the satellite hardware to be very selective about where it’s receiving from.
Absolutely; receivers, too, per above. Given some research teams and an absurd budget, maybe we could get this done by the year 2100. Or, you know, we could start an aggressive fiber rollout and have that done in a decade.
The point, though, is that we’re nowhere near the theoretical limit per se. A satellite could target a beam at a house, given enough power, and the house’s transmitter could target a particular satellite. Perhaps we just need one satellite per house—not remotely practical today in terms of costs, nevermind Kessler syndrome, but it would not violate the laws of physics any more than enclosing the earth in a Dyson sphere. It’s science fiction, not fantasy. (If costs fall in a manner similar to “Moore’s law”, and we can mine some asteroids, who knows?)
Meanwhile my local isps all refuse to build down my road, one of the main roads in the area.
They did build over to the rich fucks though.
Good. Do business with Nazis, get fucked.
A little clarity, here..
Saw the title. $1500 for.. using Starlink? Outside of whatever it costs to set it up in the first place?
So, looked it up. And not on Reddit.
https://starlink.com/pr/support/article/63d885d3-c269-21f9-69d6-3ed1b2fd18e9
What it says: If one sets up the service in a high-demand area, then one gets a surcharge. Once. Not multiple times.
The details: After one has Starlink in, say, a rural area, and does >not< pay the surcharge, then, moves to a high-demand area, then one >does< pay the surcharge. High-demand to high-demand move: it gets prorated. High-demand to low-demand move: No refund. Low-demand to low-demand move: No surcharge.
In the referenced Reddit case where this came up, the Redditor hadn’t moved, was just verifying their address as requested by Starlink. Whoops! Was in a high-demand area, hadn’t paid the surcharge, so Starlink hit they Redditor with that $1500 number. I agree, that sucks.
Interestingly, a web search to determine exactly where the demand search areas are comes up dry when it comes to official data from Starlink. That is, one can find out on an address-by-address area, but there’s no actual map. Given that the local Home Depot has a Starlink terminal for sale on the floor, that implies that Starlink is trying to get people to buy the terminal first.. then find out later that there’s this surcharge. They do give one the option to cancel within 30 days, but that means wasting one’s time.
This is why he clung to the neck of the rural broadband program like a vampire to the neck of a virgin, on top of the free money, if his is the only option, he can just demand more at any point if he needs to juice the profits at SpacetwitterXsla.
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Wow, I’m not an Elon fan but how do you people live with all that hate. Must exhausting and you must have miserable life. Can you even get out of bed in the morning?
Re:
The telltale of having a miserable life is attributing opinions you don’t agree with as “hate”.
How is that working out for you?
Re:
Hate is a special emotion/feeling/state of mind that requires a bit of obsession to fully inhabit. While Elon is a horrible human being who deserves every bit of bad press and mockery and scorn and derision that he has coming to him—especially for what he did through DOGE—there’s really only one person in the world for whom I reserve full-on hatred. (That’s the orange-tinted motherfucker who made going through a single day without thinking about him and the damage he’s causing to this world all but impossible.)
That besides, I kind of pity Elon. He’s the richest man on Earth and he doesn’t have any actual friends; he hates one of his own children because she’s transgender and kept another child around him for weeks as a human shield after that CEO got Luigi’d; his mother keeps trying to tell everyone to leave her special boy alone; he keeps trying to make himself beloved or at least meme-able, but he fails every time because he’s so fucking cringey about it; and he seems wholly unwilling to take any time for any introspection that doesn’t end with him kissing his own ass. On top of everything else that’s wrong with him—from the drug use to the racism—he’s just so fucking pathetic that hating him feels like a waste of time. Like, when It Happens™, I’m throwing my ass a personal pizza party and celebrating the whole goddamn day. Elon dying from a ketamine overdose wouldn’t warrant anything beyond a hearty belly laugh.
Now, go ahead and keep defending the trillionaire who will never care about your existience in any way. I insist.
Re:
It feels wonderful, you ignorant bag of dicks.
Re:
First, Musk has considerable power and influence. He affects peoples daily lives with his whims and his machinations. He has cost people their lives and their livelihoods. So if you value human life and human rights, it’s not that you hate Musk, but that you’re morally consistent in condemning inhumane greed that is literally killing people.
Second, being aware of what such a person is doing is just basic education. Seen those Tesla bumper stickers that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy?” People know he’s immoral and a problem. They admit they’d rather not patronize his businesses and make him more money and give him more power. Some people claim they didn’t know he was problematic until DOGE. Now they know. If anyone didn’t know until now, they have even more information. Suggesting people shouldn’t keep themselves informed is just telling people to accept the greed and corruption.
So the question isn’t how do people live with the hatred of greed and apathy and antisocial power-mongers, but rather why you aren’t angry about the abuses you should be well aware of? What is wrong with you that people calling out sociopathy are the problem rather than the sociopathy itself?
Starlink has gone from the “better than nothing” status to the “you’re better off with nothing” status. And that’s just the purely financial concern. There’s still the fascist insurrectionist views of its owner in his “I’ll do anything to destroy the ideals of American democracy if I think it benefits me somehow” phase (which was always his normal state even before it was known publicly).
Musk Money
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/elon-musk-says-sadly-yes-200126096.html
Musk is not in the habit of donating. He’s not going to foot the bill for installs. If he was we wouldn’t be talking about it.
Physics is what it is… until we learn otherwise. The SH theorem (not a law) is only as good as today’s tech. The example of number of transistors on a chip was a good one. The five-minute mile is another.
So politics and regulations aside the real question is what the market will bear, and these behemoth companies have done more research than all TD readers. Starlink concluded billing some people $1,500 is a great deal. For whom I’m not sure.
Want to connect to “THE Backbone”? That went away with ANSnet. Now there are many, and the more money you pour into railway fiber lays the more there will be. Interconnects became MAEs and CIXs and now SWITCH and other IO interconnects abound.
I’m loath to bring up the “No datacenters in my neighborhood!” crap because some of them are interconnect hubs. The Internet requires them to minimize latency and single points of failure (SPOFs).
No resumé here, as I’ve founded two ISPs (and sold them) since 1992. I watched the commercial Internet come into existence, the backbones built to bypass DARPA’s “academic” restrictions on use, etc.
Physics is fine. LEO vs GEOSTAT is a choice. Backbones are where companies put them, and they do that based on customer projected revenue. MRR is king. Also $1,500 NRR doesn’t hurt — if you can get it.
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