Comment by brador

Lots of rural places with zero cell coverage. Where I live cell coverage goes to zero as soon as you leave a city. I've long wanted this for a low data rate base station for a mobile Meshtastic network out hiking and camping. Remains to be seen if this new plan would work for that, but I am interested for that and a remote sensing project in my professional life.

One could imagine similar, more serious uses for remote sensors, agriculture etc. Local mesh network to a base station, satellite uplink to the data consumer. Even in places with cellular coverage, it could be useful as an emergency fallback connection.

For people who are spending more for the same use cases.

I'd like you to endure the suffering from mobile providers of where I live.

I have 4 providers available. All bad in my area. Live near the county HQ

I actually moved onto a yacht post COVID and was able to afford a rural cabin with starlink because of that. Judging by the used boat market that seems to have been more common than you would think.

Covid was the best time to get a yacht in living memory. IDK why small recreational sailboats are so associated with wealth, it's a very accessible middle class hobby and most of the people doing it are not particularly wealthy. If you can afford a second car you can afford a sailboat.

The problem with starlink for sailing is the power usage. Prime solar panel space is pretty limited on a sub-30 foot boat and the starlink hardware takes approximately as much power as everything else you would want to run combined (gps/plotter, ais, nav lights, radios). Unless they're releasing new hardware this won't really be usable except on large cruising boats, which are more of a rich people thing.