Musk's Starlink Pre-Order Subscribers Say Customer Service Is A No Show

Musk's Starlink Pre-Order Subscribers Say Customer Service Is A No Show

3 years ago
Anonymous $WHrWmjSJBZ

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210909/07424747530/musks-starlink-pre-order-subscribers-say-customer-service-is-no-show.shtml

The narrative du jour is that Elon Musk's companies are just so damn innovative that they don't have to adhere to basic norms. His companies don't need a functioning PR department, for example, because Musk is just so damn charming on Twitter. As you may have noticed, this narrative isn't always particularly accurate.

Take Starlink, Musk's attempt to disrupt telecom with low orbit satellites providing pretty impressive broadband speeds. The service remains in beta, and because there's limited satellite capacity (an unfortunate side effect of physics), it won't be able to provide service to more than say 500-800k subscribers for some time (for scale: 42 million lack broadband and 83 million live under a broadband monopoly). So needless to say, those slots are going to be relatively precious for folks out of the reach of traditional broadband who'll genuinely be helped by having a new option.