When Julie Slama and her husband moved to a home outside Dunbar, Nebraska, in April 2022, they were happy customers of Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The satellite-based internet service from Musk’s rocket-maker, SpaceX, was the only practical option for them in their rural community, and their $90 monthly rate has felt reasonable in the years since.
SpaceX is set to list on the stock market this week at a valuation of more than $1 trillion, and Slama is now feeling the squeeze. She and her husband, parents of three who run a law firm from their home, face a 44 percent jump in their internet bill, an annual increase of nearly $500.
Starlink told some U.S. customers last month it was raising prices and increased the cost of most plans for a service that counts millions of users across the country.
“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only real option we have,” said Slama, a Republican and former Nebraska state senator. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Musk has long billed Starlink as a lifeline: an internet service that will finally bring reliable connectivity to people in the world’s rural and off-the-grid locales.
As its parent company moves toward an IPO, rural broadband advocates say the company has begun to squeeze its isolated U.S. users, raising prices in areas where options are limited and striving to box out competition.
SpaceX has lobbied against federal spending that would benefit Starlink’s rural broadband alternatives, calling the issue it targets “effectively … solved,” an assertion disputed by advocates for wider broadband access and many residents of rural areas.
Musk’s company has benefited from the administration of his political ally President Donald Trump, which has cut some rural broadband funding and worked to allow Starlink to qualify for some of what remains.
“When you have a captured consumer you are able to raise the prices,” said Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the nonpartisan Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “Given that broadband is an essential service and that the consumer has to buy it you’re able to … squeeze them often.”
In March last year, when Musk was still overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting project, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the $42 billion broadband access program known as BEAD, approved by Congress in 2021 and championed by President Joe Biden, would adopt a new “tech-neutral approach.”
Lutnick’s changes sought to modify federal standards in a way that made services such as Starlink eligible for grants they would not previously have qualified for, tweaking requirements that previously oriented the program toward fiber broadband.
He said loosening the rules of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program was a strike against “woke mandates, favoritism toward certain technologies, and burdensome regulations” from the Biden administration.
SpaceX subsequently sent stern letters to states that have allocated significant BEAD funding toward fiber rather than its own satellite-based internet products, media outlets have reported.
Nebraska’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, declined to deploy most of the $400 million in BEAD funding allocated for his state, proposing a “technology-neutral” approach with less than $45 million in spending instead. He expressed hope Nebraska could use the unspent funds for other purposes. Slama said she blames Pillen “for failing to use a $300 million federal grant to invest in rural fiber because ‘Starlink fixed it.'”
SpaceX “is carving out, in essence, these archipelagos of regional monopolies,” said Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University. “Over time that all-in cost for satellite will be much greater than fiber. It’s just that the cost will be borne by the end user.”
Starlink, through its parent company SpaceX, did not respond to a request for comment. Musk has decried the “massive subsidies to Starlink competitors for American rural broadband” and has said Starlink has “outperformed” its competition in the rural broadband space.
In response to a request for comment to the governor’s office, the Nebraska Broadband Office, which administers the BEAD program for the state, said it is awaiting guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on the unused funds.
“The topography and density of locations … in Nebraska are conducive to a mix of technologies, and in certain areas Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite solutions can enhance connectivity,” its statement said. “The Nebraska Broadband Office does not believe a disproportionate amount of locations have been allocated to LEOs.”
Fixed wireless connections represent more than half of the state’s proposed awards, with the rest a mix of fiber and satellite, the office said, the latter representing more than a third.
The NTIA, a part of the Commerce Department, defended its strategy, and a spokesperson pointed to a March statement in which its administrator said it would be “taking additional time” to finalize the status of the unspent funds sought by states such as Nebraska.
“NTIA’s BEAD reforms increased competition among providers and technologies, which expanded consumer choice, attracted substantial private investment, and delivered better value for taxpayers,” the spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
Fiber broadband can offer faster and more stable connectivity than satellite-based internet but requires installation of a last-mile connections to residences, which can be time-consuming and expensive.
Because Starlink satellites are constantly passing overhead, users in isolated places can quickly get connected after powering up a Starlink receiver. Many people in service-starved places around the United States and the world regard it as a godsend.
Musk built the service by using SpaceX’s reusable rockets to assemble the world’s largest satellite constellation and has called it “alien-level technology.”
Meinrath and others say it’s now acting like something more familiar: a traditional telecom company that uses its market dominance to box out potential competition and lock in increasingly dissatisfied consumers.
Starlink operates worldwide and Musk has ambitions far beyond rural America. Musk recently said that if the service maintains its current trajectory “Starlink will one day carry the majority of Internet traffic.” SpaceX said in a recent company filing that Starlink has a potential customer base of more than 3.3 billion potential users, a number encompassing much of the global population.
The future of SpaceX depends on the success of Starlink, which is the healthiest part of the company’s business, according to its recent filing. The broadband service makes up most of the company’s connectivity segment, which generated more than $4 billion in profit in 2025 on more than $11 billion in revenue.
That offsets some but far from all the billions of dollars of losses from the space launch, AI and social media businesses Musk has consolidated into SpaceX. A Morningstar report last week called Starlink the company’s “primary cash generation engine and internal funding source for other ambitious projects the firm has underway.” The added scrutiny that comes with being a publicly listed company that has to disclose earnings and losses could increase the incentive for SpaceX to increase Starlink pricing.
SpaceX in its recent filing highlighted the built-in advantage satellite internet has with residents of rural areas, who around the world are “structurally underserved by terrestrial broadband infrastructure due to unfavorable deployment economics, limited network density and high last-mile costs,” the company said. “This structural imbalance creates a large, durable and relatively uncontested baseline market for satellite-based connectivity solutions.”
Broadband experts said that as Starlink focuses on expansion it will be challenged by difficulties including competing with fiber and other internet services in more populated areas and the capacity constraints of using satellites.
Last year, Meinrath and collaborators calculated that when around seven or more people within a square mile use Starlink the service would slip below the federal definition of broadband for sending data. The company regularly launches new satellites to address capacity constraints, but its satellite connections can also be obstructed by trees, poles and roofs.
As the density of users tapping into its satellites increases, SpaceX is expected to raise the barrier to entry by pricing its services higher, experts said. Potential rivals in satellite-based internet, such as Amazon Leo, have faced setbacks in getting their Starlink competitors up and running. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).
Nebraska residents are already experiencing the pinch from Starlink’s dominance, an issue that crosses party lines, said Austin Ahlman, an independent congressional candidate in the state. The former journalist extensively researched SpaceX and Starlink for the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, which advocates for antitrust enforcement.
“SpaceX has been doing everything possible to create this myth that they are some altruist” serving rural residents “out of the kindness of their hearts,” said Ahlman, who is running in a district that encompasses his hometown of Norfolk and areas south to the state capital Lincoln and beyond.
“They’re monopolizing the market and calling it doing us a favor,” he said. “It’s largely Republican areas in western parts of the state who are being killed” by the lack of competition, he added. Ahlman wants to see federal subsides for Starlink to require the company to accept price controls and, more broadly, said he’d like a wider slate of internet options for rural Nebraskans.
Austin Schmit, a 33-year-old nurse anesthesiologist and friend of Ahlman’s, said Starlink offered him a $59 monthly rate around the time he and his family moved into a home they’d built in Crete, Nebraska, late last year. Starlink emerged as the best option available after another service provider said it was infeasible to connect his home to a nearby fiber optic line, he said.
But Starlink recently informed Schmit his bill will more than double, he said. He said he is frustrated by the rate hike, especially after he put a hole in his new roof to run his Starlink connection into the home. The state’s move to rely on satellite internet to cover so many areas, he said, entails “reckless thinking.”
“Are we just going to be stuck with this and [they] just bleed us until we can’t be bled anymore? I prefer more options,” he said. “That’s the whole beauty of market competition.”
Slama, the lawyer who depends on high speeds and bandwidth for video streaming consultations with legal clients, said she understands why Starlink wouldn’t want competitors in her market.
“Fiber would offer a far more stable alternative,” she said, adding, “I would switch to fiber tomorrow if it was offered. It makes sense from a business perspective that Starlink is opposing rural fiber expansion.”
