$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500/mo for the service.
Looks like it's targeting the enterprise market.
The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I'm not an expert on this)?
Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low latency. Particularly if you're in an area where your only other option is geostationary (which sucks and costs a lot).
Why does this seem aimed at the enterprise market (besides the price tag)? From what I've seen, Starlink uses CGNAT (carrier grade network address translation) so it's hard to handle incoming connections (given the lack of a public IP address). CGNAT seems like it would be a problem for enterprise customers. Would this be enterprises in cities where they'd be looking for a backup for a wired connection? I know that a lot of companies have wireless back-ups for their wired connection so I'm not sure that Starlink would be a better enterprise option for them.
The question in my head is whether Starlink is going to slow down their $100-tier signups if they start seeing enough $500-tier signups. People have been waiting for years to get Starlink. If they start getting lots of $500-tier interest, it seems like they'd prioritize those users for new signups.
> Unlimited Service Locations:
Starlink is ideal for rural and remote locations. Order as many Starlinks as needed and manage all of your service locations, no matter how remote, from a single account.
This screams corp fleet management of the equipment, similar to SSO price segmentation.
The cost paired with this copy: “enabling high throughput connectivity for small offices, storefronts, and super users across the globe.”
It’s 5x the price of standard Starlink (both for the hardware and the monthly cost). Won’t be worth it for most regular users imo when standard Starlink is quite good.
I’d pay $150/mo easily and maybe $200/mo for premium, but not $500/mo.
There’s also currently no way to order one from your current account if you have regular Starlink, you have to use a different email (also suggests targeting different market).
Why is CGNAT an issue ? Enterprise here doesn't mean on-prem public facing hosting. It just means rich entity that can afford $500/month per account. It could be anything ranging from a government office to a small business. You just need the ability to connect to your actual servers in AWS or wherever and transfer at acceptable rates and latency.
They say in their support topics that they may support publicly routable IPs in the future, so it looks like they may change that. But not all enterprise use-cases require inbound traffic, or they may require the bandwidth and low-latency even more, and can workaround the CGNAT in the meantime.
How many enterprises are running their own DCs these days? Very few from what I see. Cloud for your services, StarLink for individual office premises. Sounds fine to me.
Many small enterprises probably aren't. But the CGNAT problem can be solved by a VPN seamlessly connecting to the rest of the enterprise network, for those companies that need incoming connectivity (might be for remote maintenance, for example).
I was nodding along until I got to the $500/mo. service charge. I'd feel pretty good about $150/mo. or $200/mo., but I guess I'm not their target market since I have decent wired broadband. I was hoping that this would give Spectrum some competition in our area, but I'll have to wait a little longer.
Starlink won't really ever be designed to compete with wired internet. There is limited bandwidth per satellite, and the density of most places that have good wired internet far exceeds what is reasonable on the current generation of satellites.
It's designed for people who are currently suffering on geostationary satellite internet, or some other low-bandwidth/high-latency setup.
Exactly. I'm typing this out over a first-gen Starlink connection, and the value is a lot better than most people realize. My other options include:
- 4g hotspot, 150ms latency, ~15gb/month, speeds of ~10-20mbps, costs $50 + $15/gb overage per month
- WISP network, 400ms latency, unlimited data at 500kbps-6mbps, ~95% uptime, costs $80/month
- HughesNet satellite, 600ms latency, 50gb/month, less than 10mb/s down, 90% uptime, $150/month
Or I could get Starlink with ~50ms of latency, unlimited data, ~100-150mbps down, 99% uptime at the fair price of $100 per month. Once you've lived away from broadband for long enough, you can bet everyone is fed up with the other 3 options.
With the spread of 5G mid and high band home internet service I wonder if that might not cover enough ground at some point to make it worthwhile. Verizon is actually selling it as unlimited internet for a decent price. I don't know about other carriers.
It certainly won't cover anything out where I live. Even if they did put up a 5G antennae, it would cover maybe 2 houses on my street if they placed it strategically.
you're getting better service than the others because they are not at capacity, and won't be until the chip shortage is over. enjoy it while you can, because speeds will get worse soon, and what you thought was a great service will be just like the rest.
I live in Australia, a 30 minutes drive from the centre of a state capital and I've had a near 10x increase in my download speed and a 4x increase in my upload speed by moving to Starlink. I'm paying $40 AUD extra per month ($130 for Starlink, $90 for pleb tier wired) for the privilege. My wired link will not go any faster, 5G still isn't available at my house, and even if it was it's metered so borderline useless for a primary home link with a family watching Netflix, YouTube for kids, etc.
The regular dish is great for normal personal use already in remote areas (and the costs are very reasonable).
It’s not competitive in (most) areas with options from cable providers, but that’s also not its purpose.
Starlink will give us high speed low latency internet anywhere on earth, it moves the lower bound up to 150mbps with pretty low latency which is great.
> The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture
$3k? Were they mining the metal by hand and then using only the most hipster blacksmiths shipped in from Portland to hand press the steel for the dish?
It's not really the dish that's expensive (and it's not even a "dish antenna"). It's the integrated electronics and phased antenna array (which takes expensive tricky electronics to make it work).
There are 1500 antennas, and accompanying electronics for each, plus main board to deal with all that, GPS, motors. You also get a Wi-Fi router. Even $3000 is mindbogglingly cheap once you see what's inside of that "dish" and what quantity these are produced at (in 100K vs millions like smartphones).
Almost seems designed to get people's hopes up only to squash them again. What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize.
Announcing that:
> Order as many Starlinks as needed and manage all of your service locations, no matter how remote, from a single account.
Is niche, and is only going to confuse people waiting for true travel-Starlink.
> What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize.
What people? You? Most people want usable Internet at home.
Also, you can use a Starlink on the move just fine, just like I did. Keep changing your service location before you arrive. Takes a second, there are no limits (that I have found).
> Almost seems designed to get people's hopes up only to squash them again. What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize.
What an odd comment. Seems like a narrow way to blame the marketing. And, a narrow way to cherry pick what doesn't fit your description of what Starlink should be and shouldn't be. In truth, Starlink is an absolute game changer for the entire world. Mobile or not. I think you need to think about rural people that have to deal with shitty DSL. 20-40 ms (You can go on YT and find people benchmarking it - average I've seen is around 40-50 ms [1]) ping is amazing and 350 mbps is exceptional compared to the status quo.
Also others complaining about delays is strange. It's a fricking satellite constellation in the sky. Give them some time and slack.
It's never gonna work for camping anyways, unless you like to camp in an open field. Trees are the weak spot for Starlink, and even on my 2 acre plot, I could almost not find any clearings free of obstructions. I have a few 40+ foot trees and even though I was over 150 feet away from them, my signal was still getting obstructed.
Not who you're responding to, however a rooftop definitely doesn't guarantee clear views of the sky. I have solar pool heating on my roof, it works great, however Starlink requires 100 degrees field of view. That's a lot! There's definitely no such location on my 1.25 acre property. Even if you chopped down every single tree in my yard (not legal) there still wouldn't be 100 degree field of view due to trees in the neighbours yard.
EDIT: To clarify as to why the roof doesn't work, the trees are at least 4 times the height of my roof.
This really isn't true in my experience. I live in a forest, on the side of a mountain. I have dishy at ground level on the edge on my small parking area and it works just fine.
That's not true. The biggest problem with other satellite internet is ping, which has nothing to do with # of users (it's just that geostationary is really far away). Starlink satellites are 100x closer (so 10000x stronger signal), and there are well over 100x as many starlink satellites, so Starlink has roughly 1 million times the capacity as the other satellite internet providers.
Signal strength and channel bandwidth are only partially related.
You could blast out a 100Hz-BW CW signal at 1MW, but you will not be able to send much on it, even if you can receive it from the Moon.
There are other limits too, like channel concurrency, which you can see in action in places like busy stations or stadia where your phone can't connect and your Bluetooth headphones become unreliable. I don't know how many simultaneous connections a single Starlink transceiver can handle, though.
it looks like their previous satellites (v1.0) were 18Gbps. I haven't found anything for v1.5 which is currently deployed, or v2.0 which theoretically are starting to launch this year.
based on the plans they are selling, it almost certainly can do both 40 users at 500mbps and 200 users at 100mbps. This is a total guess, but I'd imagine it can probably do 2000 users at 10mpbs, since 10:1 over-subscription is pretty common for ISPs.
no, it's not. streaming media is the vast majority of internet traffic, and it doesn't care at all about your latency.
your capacity math is so far off it's just crazy. if they had a million times the capacity of current satellites they would have around 250 petabits per second.
> No Hard Data Limits††
>
> If you exceed your plan data, we won't cut you off or charge you more. Stay connected at reduced speeds, typically 1-3 Mbps.
Are they, though? (Seriously, I once looked at them, and promptly concluded that unless I wanted to give up streaming video and pulling docker images, there was no point since I'd blow through the data cap in a week or two.)
The number of people who have a summer home is extremely high. Having two dishes, or one dish that can be used from two set points is very attractive. Lots of people spend the summer "at the cabin" even when the cabin isn't in the Hamptons.
Or they may live out of a motor home, but it only moves to travel between their regular winter destination and their regular summer destination. They stay in the same two parks all year except for the 4 days of travel in between.
Millions of USians fall into these two demographics. I'm sure plenty outside the US do, too.
Nearly 10% of the local ISPs' subscribers are motor home snowbirds. They don't show up in NAHB statistics. Homeowner snowbirds increase that number. Starlink is definitely a matter of attention for local ISPs.
I can remember "USians" being in use since at least as far back as the 90s. It's just a cute way of acknowledging there's more to the Americas than just the US.
I read the current Starlink system has a limitation where if you move outside of your assigned service "cell", you lose service. Guessing this is still the case.
Eh, really? It's due to needing ground station visibilty for the consumers as there's no intra satellite routing links, I thought and they didn't want to swamp the contention ratio whilst they were in beta? Why would the FCC be stopping this?
The FCCs mandate is to protect the airwaves from interference. Starlink uses shared bands. if the receivers move, tracking down interference is harder.
this is not really true relative to what OP said. there are fcc regulations for spectral leakage and such, but that's well known and means you can't transmit outside a service area. but that just means you're in another, adjacent service area. it has more to do with the spectral efficiency going down as you move from boresight, so they don't want a capacity loss. fcc has nothing to do with this decision.
I have one and it's really great. Went from high latency 10mbps (calnet) to low latency 150mbps (starlink). Prior to calnet we had geostationary satellite which was unusably bad and would try to tether through Verizon but signal was very weak.
It's life changing if you're in an area without other options (though it does suck it's taking a long time for people to get access).
I bought it for my in-laws in Placerville California for when I’m there so can’t easily check right now, but I recall 24-40ms typically closer to 24-30ms.
Probably good enough, biggest pain is finding a view without obstructions from trees.
Everyone seem to assume that the only reason dates got pushed was because they were looking for premium customers. I don't think that's true.
I think a lot of dates that got pushed back are simply because they couldn't launch enough satellites to provide enough bandwidth in certain popular cells without degradation of quality. 'But tons of people who ordered way after me are getting them' you might say, but that's because they are being served by the same satellites in different cells that are likely less crowded along their trajectories. The were monetizing the capability that already exists, they are not prioritizing someone else.
I wonder if Starlink will start prioritizing their premium customers. If someone is willing to pay 5x more, it seems like Starlink would want to get to them first.
Of course they will. But that’s standard practice of every telecom company.
Thats ingrained in the transport protocols, from TDM, to Frame Relay/ATM and also IP technologies
Source: I used to work in one Telecom company
My understanding is that the Starlink antenna uses a phased array allowing some electronic steering and that it has motors for physically steering it. The physical steering is just done at setup time to point the antenna in the right general direction for your location and the the phased array is used for actually tracking satellites.
A back of the envelope calculation tells me that when they have all their satellites deployed any given service location will have several hundred satellites visible at any one time.
Question: does a given customer's connection just use one satellite at a time, tracking it with the phased array until it moves too far and then switching to another? Or does it use more than one at a time in parallel?
Yeah, no. Legally, each cell can only be covered by one satellite beam because otherwise it might cause interference [with non-Starlink systems]. Given that the terminal only has one beam hitting it, there's no point in designing the terminal to support multiple beams.
that's not how modern satellites work. there are overlapping frequency bands and polarizations in the same location that do not interfere. there's also tdma to prevent interference.
Tesla did the same ,,strategy'' when it couldn't deliver the $35k car, as scaling was too optimistic: get a premium version with much higher margins and make people buy that. There are lots of people for whom $500 is worth a great internet, as it helps them deliiver work significantly more work value.
I pre-paid Starlink for delivery last Spring and it never materialized. And see similar comments here from others on never yet receiving it after long waits.
I pre-paid at the start of last year and it materialised before Christmas, here in the UK. Friends got it 6 months before me, for pre-ordering a few of months earlier on the beta.
Perhaps your cell was full, but that doesn't excuse the customer service.
Elon had a letter in December that to be able to make money on Starlink, they have to launch Starship first....I guess he realized that it's easier to raise prices.
In 2020 they took my $99 deposit and told me I'd have service in the Summer of 2021. Then at the end of 2021 they sent an email saying that nope, it will be sometime in 2023. Now, this says I might get it this year if I pay an unaffordable price.
Frustrating, since this is the only opportunity on the horizon for more than my current 10 MiB DSL, and I live online. Please Starlink, stop making new promises and shoving them in the queue in front of your old promises!
I access a remote site near Vancouver with starlink and we have another satellite internet service there too. The starlink cuts out for 5-15s every 3-7 minutes. Makes talking on voip very frustrating. The old satellite with 700ms latency is better for me.
You have obstructions. I spent weeks getting mine to work right and had to top a couple of trees and build a custom pole mount to get it even higher on the roof. Being in a remote site around Vancouver, you're probably dealing with lots of tall trees too.
Thanks for the hints, I’ll talk
To the guy who recently re Aimed the dish and see what could be in the way. I’m pretty familiar with dealing line of sight issues for wireless links. We’re in a valley so might be tough to improve our path.
Look in the Starlink app, under visibility after it has run for 24h and it will show you where all the obstructions are. Quite handy. Clear is blue, red is obstruction.
Rain reduces the speed and increases the latency (I'm actually not sure why the latency increases, it's not like the signal has to go further) but, it still works.
Not sure about that? In a UDP based ping it's fire and forget so wouldn't repeat, so would show as packet loss not increased latency.
Unless the physical layer is using more FEC and using longer "timeslots" to get to transmit the payload. But even that seems unlikely to cause major latency increases?
It's vanishingly rare for radio-based networks to actually rely on high level IP behavior for redelivery, as it's much faster to fix these issues on the single radio link than to wait for things to go round trip. The data link protocol typically has its own reliable delivery implementation that will result in multiple retries. This results in increased latency in poor network conditions. 802.11 behaves similarly.
Does your latency measurement account for dropped packets? Rain-caused attenuation could cause more packets to be dropped, increasing latency if you measure it as an average over total packets sent, instead of just across packets that get delivered?
Ohh ok. Got it. That seems fair. Similar to a Satellite TV antenna. I get good tv reception even in cloudy conditions. I have lost reception in very heavy rainy conditions only. So I guess the same is true for Starlink too.
My gigabit symmetric fiber at home is $70/mo. The same service from the same provider costs $400/mo at our office. The answer to your question seems to be "because business".
I ordered my Dishy day 1 and have still not gotten it and they are already launching new services. Anyhow, this looks expensive, but for a business it's pretty cheap.
I ordered mine on January 3 (the same day I rented a new house), it shipped from California on January 7, and received it on January 14. I'm in northern New Zealand.
Does this make starlink any more feasible? I thought that the math just doesn't work out.
Not to mention the massive amount of space garbage (40k satellites replaced every 5 years?)
See for example a "busted" video https://youtu.be/zaUCDZ9d09Y?t=912
It only just showed up for CA (in 2021) and mostly only along the border (eg Victoria). Granted a lot of population is lower.. but current ETAs (from the starlink "Order" page) for the 5 biggest cities are all tbd:
- Montreal late 2022 (4.2M people)
- Vancouver late 2022 (2.6M people)
- Toronto 2022-2023 (6.2M people)
- Calgary 2022-2023 (1.6M people)
- Edmonton late 2023 (1.4M people)
There is no way that getting a satellite connection inside a city is cheaper or more practical than a physical line though. It will be necessarily slower, have worse latency and be more expensive.
I didn't say it was? I just used cities (major population centers) to determine what coverage was like (bad) and how much of the country had access (almost none).
It'd be good if they would spec the upstream throughout. I have Starlink as a backup to my own terrestrial microwave network and the 20Mbit max upload is the only thing stopping me using only Starlink and retiring from the networking business.
Really hoped they supported subscription pausing by now. Doesn't make sense paying a year's sub for a secondary home when you're only there for a couple months, unless it's the only option you have.
“Unlimited Service Locations. Order as many Starlinks as needed”
Does this mean I could have 3 on a property to triple bandwidth? If 1 per property, could I have my neighbours hang together? (High density, 10M between 3 dishes).
But when it matters, it matters — there's a huge productivity difference between waiting 5 minutes and 30 minutes when making staging deploys to iterate on bugs (and sometimes I'll do this 5-10 times in a day).
My way around this that's less than $500/mo and indefinite wait times is to have an EC2 image running as a jump box. Then anything downloaded is already on AWS's network, making ECR uploads much faster.
There will definitely eventually be cheaper options. But not for a while and likely not in America. The satellites are unused over Africa etc, and they can't pay $100 per month. But until the manufacturing cost of the dishes comes down, a cheaper option is unlikely.
I don't agree with that. the likelihood of them reducing the cost of the antenna to what it needs to be in Africa is close to 0. even legacy satellite providers, with terminals that are 1/5 the cost cannot do it. and those aren't phased array
so, when you compare to cable do you also say 25-50Mbps speeds? because that's the minimum cable speed I'm my area. But 1Gb is the max. since when has comparing minimum speeds ever been a valid comparison?
$500/month for 350Mbps! What exactly is Elon been smoking?! Okay, it's mobile... given you have electricity, of course, but if you have electricity, won't you have other options as well?
> but if you have electricity, won't you have other options as well?
No. There's a huge chunk of North America by area that does not have 100+mbit/sec broadband.
Most of those areas don't have huge population, but those who are there sometimes are there for good reasons.
Starlink is wonderful for those people.
There are a lot of people who have delusions that Starlink is going to have a significant impact on mainstream wireline broadband providers, which is absurd, but there's a lot of the world that still has nothing even close to what this service offers.
If (and this is a massive IF) they get the laser linking working it'll be huge for the aviation and marine worlds but even as is it's the best thing to happen to rural broadband service in years.
---
Personally I hope they get mobile service for RVs working soon, all I need to work is reliable low-latency internet access so if I can theoretically get it from anywhere in the country I am free.
NZ has done the high speed fibre roll out really nicely - this includes small rural towns (1,600 people, 433 people from two rural areas near me) this is gigabit fibre. It costs about $95 NZD a month for 1000Mbps/500Mbps unlimited.
For those who are in the cities (like me), we have access to "hyperfibre" which is like 2Gbps which costs about $150-$200 NZD a month (unlimited).
This speaks so badly about America, but you're right - I know at least two pretty large and heavily-populated dead spots in the heart of Irvine, California.
I'm not sure the site is claiming that. They claim 20-40ms latency for the premium plan and "as low as 20ms" for the regular plan. Real world latency on the system seems to be around 45-50ms. The section says "highER speed, low latency" [emphasis mine]. So the speed will be higher than regular Starlink, but the latency will be low just like regular Starlink.
A tangent: it's honestly really disappointing to me that Starlink requires proprietary equipment to use. High-speed, low-latency satellite internet would've been a real game-changer in countries where the government seeks to control information flow by blocking websites and online services. But because you need the proprietary dish made specifically for Starlink, they'll of course just restrict import of these.
Maybe when the open source community successfully executes manned space missions, we can free ourselves from the tyranny of proprietary satellite technology…
They could've published their documentation so it would be possible to build a client terminal yourself out of readily available parts. You'll still have to pay for the service itself, obviously. And I'm not talking about satellites themselves, only about the user equipment.
I don't think you understand the complexity of what you're suggesting. I doubt there are any off-the-shelf chips suitable to build a Starlink terminal and even if there were it would still cost over $10M and maybe more like $100M to design the terminal.
This is going to cost all of us, money and a whole lot more, once his space junk triggers the Kessler effect (or accelerates, because many think it is already slowly under way, but the growth is exponential).
Ground astronomy is already "ruined", thanks to Starlink: IIRC from something I read recently, what used to be fraction of the percent of plates ruined by satellites right before Starlink, now has risen to astounding 20%.
Are we not concerned about Kessler syndrome anymore so that we think that hastily doubling the amount of satellites around there is a good idea?
The news came in that SpaceX rocket stage will accidentally hit the Moon and will become first billionaire made garbage/pollution there.
Are we sure we trust this company with not devastating low earth orbit due to some accidents?
And for what? For expensive mediocre internet for limited number of users in places where infrastructure is lacking? Infrastructure? You know, the thing we should build more of, that serves poor people? Those people that limited expensive mediocre toys don't serve?
> And for what? For expensive mediocre internet for limited number of users in places where infrastructure is lacking? Infrastructure? You know, the thing we should build more of, that serves poor people? Those people that limited expensive mediocre toys don't serve?
Huh? Internet service is infrastructure.
There are lots of people in rural areas that don't have proper service. The goal is to get them service, by whatever method is most effective. And in lots of areas, starlink is more effective than running wires.
So why shouldn't we use starlink for those people? It's nonsense to balk at the price if you're suggesting we do something even more expensive. If the price is too high then we can apply subsidies to it. Instead of applying those subsidies to offerings that are worse.
No, cause Elon is obsessed with
Mars, and a Kessler cascade would make it that much harder to set up a Mars base, so even just from a totally self-serving angle, Elon has a high prerogative to avoid space collisions.
Not to mention it would be terrible for SpaceX business on a far shorter timescale.
If there's one thing you can count on, it's that billionaires will defend their bottom line.
In an interview last year (forget with who, maybe Jay Leno?), Elon gave the entire interview while his Tesla was driving them around. I'm guessing he puts a lot of faith into it. Though he probably only drives around areas that are pretty well tested in Teslas already.
I haven't check their prices at all till now and holy guacamole - for about half of their monthly price my ISP gives me up to 1 Gb/s FTTH without transfer limits (asymmetric connection - tho, not an issue; speed varies from city to city but I can't complain now - it's not the faulty copper line that made me more offline than online), unlimited VoIP phone and tv with almost 200 channels and HBO GO (not that I would watch anything) and a mobile plan with 80GB per month w/ unlimited calls. And combined Shipping & Handling and Hardware would give me some 1 or 2 yo Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
It seems I'm not the target for Starlink
Since some of you decided to "punish" me: I am honestly surprised how pricey this service is in Poland and in comparison to what my ISP gives me for half of the price.
Anyone with a fiber connection available is absolutely not the target market for starlink. It is meant for rural users with few better options. In fact, dense urban or suburban areas would overload the satellites, so subscribers in those areas will need to be limited.
I'm still not 100% convinced on the size of this market. Rural FTTH rollouts are happening and over the next 5-10 years I think will get everywhere you have grid electricity. I constantly see people on the starlink Reddit cancelling their preorders or service because they can get FTTH or cable.
There's no doubt it's an amazing technical achievement, and a huge improvement for many people. But I am somewhat struggling to see the business case for maintaining many thousands of satellites, which only last for a few years before requiring replacement, in a market that basically gets smaller each year (because more people can get FTTH or cable as rollouts increase).
Even worse, starlink performance will degrade as more users and/or average bandwidth use ticks up.
This rural road has some 20 homes on it. There is absolutely zero chance a local ISP decides to dig up the road on their own just to bring fiber to those 20 homes. We don't even have cable internet here.
I don't understand why people complain that I'm not supposed to use Starlink, when it's the only good internet option I have, and the same price as a much worse performing 10 Mbps option.
At my cousin's property (which I spend a lot of time at), for a little less than their monthly price, AT&T gives us an analog telephone line with local calling. That's it.
My city of about 70k people was in the pilot program of this FTTH infrastructure upgrade in the whole country and I'm really happy I could leave my old faulty copper line behind me (tho, phone number was carried over).
No schleep. It's aimed at rural users who, if they don't get laughed at for asking someone about fiber, get a quote of "Well, for half a million up front, we'll consider starting the design plans..."
Looks like it's targeting the enterprise market.
The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I'm not an expert on this)?
Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low latency. Particularly if you're in an area where your only other option is geostationary (which sucks and costs a lot).