Starlink recently announced plans for some interesting billing options. First, they will consider allowing customers to resell bandwidth to their neighbors by setting up small local grids. They are also considering allowing for billing by the hour, day, or week. What’s interesting about this is if this introduced in the U.S., it would allow for broadband billing in ways that already happen in many other parts of the world.

As an example, I’ve done some work in Nigeria, where customers struggle to afford broadband, and only businesses and relatively wealthy people buy unlimited monthly plans. The vast majority of broadband is provided by cellular carriers. There are a number of options for buying broadband for short periods of time. Unlike here, there is no loyalty to a specific cellular company, and a customer can choose to buy what is commonly called a daily plan from multiple cellular companies, and many people carry multiple SIM cards. These daily plans are most commonly sold in one- or two-day increments. The bandwidth on the daily plans is relatively small, with a daily cap of something like 240 MB, which might support WhatsApp messaging (which everybody uses), emails, or light browsing for things like shopping. Carriers also sell more robust data packages. For example, a customer can buy a plan for a specific app like TikTok or Facebook/WhatsApp for the day or month. Carriers also sell night plans by the day that provide enough bandwidth to download movies when the network isn’t busy.

There is a growing amount of fiber being constructed in Lagos and other cities. In Lagos, the government builds and leases out a conduit network to lower the cost of market entry for ISPs. Fiber networks deliver slower speeds than in the U.S. but are still far more robust than cellular data. Fiber providers also sell daily or weekly plans.

I can’t recall ever hearing of anybody in the U.S. trying hourly, daily, or weekly billing before. I recall some municipal Wi-Fi networks that tried to sell WiFi access that way to visitors and most failed at it. In the early years of airport WiFi, short-term billing plans were also being pushed.

If Starlink markets short-period billing in the U.S., it is a tacit recognition that a lot of people can’t afford a monthly subscription. Selling broadband by the day is broadband rationing and will lead to the kind of customer behavior I’ve witnessed in Nigeria, where customers save up broadband tasks for when they buy a daily plan. While this is better than not having broadband, it’s second-class broadband for those who can’t afford a full-time broadband subscription. Considering the number of households struggling with paying essential bills, there is likely a market for this.

The idea of allowing a customer to become a hub and share with neighbors is interesting. This is already a lot more common than you might imagine. It’s common for neighbors in apartment buildings to split a broadband bill and share WiFi through the walls. I know of examples of neighboring houses sharing broadband by running a cable or setting up a point-to-point wireless link between homes. Starlink is suggesting that people formalize this, including providing a discount for the home that becomes the main hub.

This is more of an urban idea than a rural one since homes need to be relatively close to share the signal from a common Starlink receiver. This could be a way for Starlink to crack the urban market by allowing several neighbors to share a connection to save money.

Starlink is clearly familiar with these kinds of models since it works worldwide. The company would have little chance of competing in Nigeria and many other African countries if it doesn’t allow for the way that people already buy broadband. It’s going to be interesting to see if the company really pushes these two ideas in the U.S.