It's odd that Poland isn't in the list above for Europe — it's a live Starlink market and an EU country, so there's no obvious reason for the exclusion. Cyprus, Moldova, and Monaco are missing for the same unclear reason. The Balkan gap (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia) makes more sense, since most of those countries don't have live Starlink service yet.
The entire EU is treated as one country, except for Poland. Interesting detail.
While it sounded like a cool idea at first, the only impactful thing starlink has done is fucked up earth-based astronomy.
I travel a lot, and far, and having a dongle that gives me mid to decent internet wherever I am would be rad. But it's wildly expensive compared to every other isp, and on top of that, they've always had a requirement that you're tied to a single location. And that defeats the whole fucking purpose. Entirely.
We could have Such Cool Shit, if only some pukes weren't such fuckbags about everything.
Like fucking for real.
Blow up earth based astronomy. Give everyone in the world free, or bus fare cheap, internet. That's rad. That's worthwhile. That's something an advanced civilization would fucking do. Not this bullshit.
On the one hand, any negative Melon Usk headline fills me with joy just like all the shit flung at Meta. On the other hand, my empathy for people living on yachts who get effed by this change particularly knows bounds.
Poland - if they didn't just forget it - may be excluded because it borders Ukraine where they use Starlink for military reasons. Maybe they preserve bandwidth or try to deter roaming tourism of rich people thrill seekers or something like that. Monaco is missing because that's basically France. It's about 4 klicks across, the satellites fly at about 500 km overhead - that's probably a rounding error. Cyprus may either be too small as well or it's excluded because it is a divided island.
And yet if you live in a high usage area, you get a $1500 fee. He's just trying to get more profitable to slow the xAI sinkhole.
Technologically speaking, that seems dumb as Hell. If each satellite in the constellation has the same bandwidth no matter what spot it's flying over, you'd think that connections from the middle of the ocean would be some of the least congested and therefore the lowest-cost to handle.
You're reading a blog post from someone in the boating community so the SL changes are being evaluated through their lens. They are being impacted by these changes but I don't believe they were the target.
I suspect that Starlink is trying to close the "Grey Market" loophole, where someone purchases and activates an SL terminal in one country with the intent of using it full time in a different country.
You may not think of that as a big problem but it is how Russia keeps getting its hands on working SL terminals.
I mean, live-aboard sailing is the only reason I care about it, so that's my lens too. (Not that I'm actually doing that yet, but one day...)
This change directly impacts Russia's ability to Starlink terminal's via the Grey Market for use in their War against Ukraine.
The Poland thing was changed, it's now considered part of the EU for "Home" Roaming.
I don't see what's happening here as "Enshittification".
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.