Thanks so much for your comments over the years on this, I've read a lot of them with great interest and to my edification since I'm not remotely as deep in the field as you are. It's a little frustrating though to see comments just rushing to compare it to their cable modem or something, like even if one has zero knowledge surely there'd be some intellectual curiosity over the cool and difficult problems one would have to solve to get packets to the middle of an ocean and back? If going to geostationary like ViaSat that's ~36000km out, that's a long ways for a wireless signal! The conditions are fairly intense, ships travel all over the place through massive storms and temperature differences and very heavy seas, saltwater is massively corrosive. Wondering about that would lead someone to a bit of basic searching and in turn to pricing, platform stabilization etc. Or wondering how Starlink can possibly track LEO sats, just 500km away but moving at something like 17000 miles per hour, and then learning about electronically steerable phased arrays. The terminals themselves already represent a really cool achievement in bringing something like that down to consumer prices. Heck, I'd love to see that brought elsewhere, it'd be a treat for terrestrial 11-60 GHz PtP/PtMP links even if they could just perfectly aim themselves and correct with near zero technician requirements, merely roughly pointing it in the right direction, for $500. Doing intersat optical links is also amazing, everything about the system really helps to reinforce other aspects, it's a heck of a vision executed well.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.