StarBand

» see starband.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2000 I was on a 56k modem in Ankara that dropped every time somebody in the house picked up the phone, and I would have taken almost anything faster. StarBand was never sold to me. It was never sold to anyone outside the United States, and inside the United States it was not really sold to cities either. This was a product for the households the map had given up on.

Which is a specific kind of customer. If you lived somewhere a DSL line would never reach and a cable company would never trench, your options in 2000 were dial-up or a satellite dish that could only listen. That second option was real and it was absurd: you pulled megabits down from a spacecraft and pushed every click back up through a 56k modem on the same phone line you were trying to escape. Half a connection.

StarBand put the transmitter on the dish. The company was incorporated on 11 January 2000 by Spacenet, with Microsoft signing investment and operating agreements on 15 February and EchoStar following on 30 March. The service went live that November as the first residential two-way satellite internet in the American market, and for the people who bought it the phone line was finally just a phone line.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

The first version shipped as a PCI card. You could not simply buy a StarBand connection in 2000: you bought a PC with a Gilat SkyBlaster card already in it and the hosting software already installed, because the computer itself was part of the modem. In 2001 that gave way to the Model 180, a standalone box over USB, marketed as Windows-only because the USB interface needed particular drivers. The 180 also had an Ethernet port under a blanking plate, which owners found and used anyway.

Then a normal product arrived in stages. The Model 360 of 2002 took Ethernet properly, and the Model 480 a year later needed no software at all and would talk to a Mac or a Linux box. Their last generation, the StarBand Nova, landed in October 2006 tuned for voice calls and VPNs. The dish stayed small on purpose, three quarters of a meter, small enough that an American homeowners association had no legal footing to ban it from the roof.

~ the fair access policy ~

Residential service topped out at 1.5 Mbit down and 256 kbit up, which in 2003 was genuinely broadband, and there were six plans with weekly download ceilings from 750 megabytes to 4 gigabytes. Nobody called that a cap. It was the Fair Access Policy, and it still had its own link in the site navigation on the last day the site was up.

The business never got large. It filed Chapter 11 in 2002 and came out in 2003, with subscribers peaking around 40,000 in the same year it went bankrupt. Gilat's Spacenet division bought the whole company outright in March 2005, by which time the number was about 32,000 and heading down. From there the story is simply arithmetic. Every year some fraction of the customer base got a cable run down their road or a cell tower within range, and none of them ever came back.

~ the retirement notice ~

In August 2015 the company posted the notice and left it up as the whole homepage. The last capture before the lights went out is dated 28 September, two days before the end, and it is worth quoting because it is unusually plain for a corporate goodbye.

"Attention StarBand Customers & Contractors: We regret to inform you that due to steadily increasing operating costs, bandwidth demand and competing consumer broadband alternatives, we will be discontinuing StarBand services effective September 30th, 2015. We thank every customer who selected StarBand over the last 15 years. As you know, much has changed in the decade-and-a-half since StarBand pioneered bringing high-speed Internet access to communities beyond the reach of traditional, land-based Internet services. Unfortunately, the time has come for StarBand to retire."

The navigation bar above it had been reduced to six links, and the last one read "How to Transfer your StarBand email". That is what the end of an ISP looks like from the inside. Not the network going quiet, but a support article about getting your messages off it.

~ what came after ~

The usual account of the ending says the company also blamed the constellations coming over the horizon, naming Starlink and OneWeb as the next thing. That is worth flagging, because the page they actually left up says nothing of the kind. Its reasons are all present tense and all terrestrial, rising costs set against cheaper broadband on the ground. Starlink is also a word that could not have appeared on anything written in August 2015, because SpaceX did not attach that name to its constellation in public until 2017.

The substance underneath the mistake is true anyway. What killed StarBand was one satellite in geostationary orbit doing a job that needed thousands in low orbit, and the answer arrived about five years after the company that needed it had gone. Every complaint people had was really a complaint about physics: the round trip to 36,000 kilometers and back cannot be shortened by buying a better modem.

The copyright line at the bottom of that final page still read 2011 to 2012, three years stale, which tells you how long it had been since anyone touched the template. By mid-2016 starband.com was serving a completely different company, SageNet, the managed-network firm that had absorbed Spacenet. Today the domain still answers and there is nothing of StarBand on it.

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