€50 in Ireland, down from €65 in the last year, down from €99 in 2022. Because they know where you are, and how much money your average target customer in a country has, and how saturated their satellites in that country are, they can be very specific about pricing.
Average disposable income in Ireland is a lot higher than in Spain (source: I moved to Spain from Ireland myself). So there must be more at play there than just purchasing power. If it was purely based on that it would be more like 70 euro compared to Spain's 40.
Could be saturation indeed, as Ireland is very sparse in rural areas. And so is Spain, outside the few urban centres.
The Republic Ireland is rolling out fiber to all properties. The standard rate for gigabit fiber is ~60 euro at the moment, less if you just want 500mbs, so SpaceX was just responding to competition as fiber got to more and more properties.
Getting Starlink a few years ago was the first time we had reliable internet at our family farm, and we were stoked. We also started getting better and better service as fiber rolled out across the country, but we never got above 250mbs. Now that fiber is here, it's no longer necessary except perhaps as a backup.
I'll grant that Spanish people are on a bit less than the Irish, but please don't be misled by GDP Per Capita numbers. Irish people are hurting, especially in the parts of the country beyond greater Dublin. Dublin is well-served by €20/mo all you can eat 5G that seems to hit 300Mbps without effort, so there's no reason to compete with that. But out in the Cork mountains, where the broadband readiness date has now slipped two years to "Jan-Dec 2026," most people I know are hand to mouth or on assistance or at least not earning Dublin bucks. €50 is a stretch for such, but €20 for LTE was barely getting me 2Mb when I finally gave up on it, despite having a baller antenna.
I know, I lived in Galway for a while. The best I could get for a long time was this "ripwave" crap from Irish Broadband. Which wasn't actually broadband, on a good day it would approach dialup speeds. On a bad day it wouldn't actually work at all. It was ridiculously bad.
It was no wonder that people started rolling their own WANs with point to point wifi connections until things finally picked up.
I think the pricing is based on coverage, usage density and demand. The UK probably has enough terrestrial coverage of amy sort that they figure they can upcharge anyone who still wants/needs Starlink, since it's mainly setup to be internet service for those who have essentially no other decent choice.
Alternatively, maybe the meaningful coverage areas are so small and dense that the price should be higher. Since Starlink's biggest limitation is that performance suffers in more densely populated areas.
Not really, I loved a local new independent provider that strung its own fibre around, but moved out of that building :(
They were particularly great because they didn’t (at the time) do phone or tv, just pure solid internet. No legacy industry to protect by limiting torrents or gb/month limits (fuck you Bell Canada).
