• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    I don’t doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.

    I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon’s investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk’s proposed future revenue estimates.

    “We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!” tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      57 minutes ago

      They did exactly that with the new standby mode.

      You used to be able to pause your service for free. Then they changed it to $5/m but you got unlimited 256kb/s bandwidth and the dish would always be up to date. Just before the IPO they doubled that to $10/m and removed the ability to use it while in motion.

      I’d love to see how many people dropped the service after that 2nd price jump which wouldn’t have been apparent until after the IPO. Both changes happened within a year.