Thursday, 3 February 2022

Starlink Announces Premium Satellite Internet Service for $500 Per Month

SpaceX has been offering Starlink internet service since 2020, and subscribers have reported a slow but steady increase in speeds as Elon Musk’s rockets continue filling the sky with new satellites. Starting soon, even faster speeds will be available, but you’ll need to subscribe to the new Starlink Premium. It will cost a whopping $500 per month, and the hardware isn’t cheap, but you do get roughly twice the bandwidth. 

The standard Starlink service costs $99 per month and offers up to 250Mbps speeds, but it’s closer to 100Mbps for most users. Starlink Premium has a maximum throughput of 500Mbps. Starlink promises the same network latency of 20-50ms. You’re not connecting to anything different on Starlink’s end — it’s all about that new dish with double the surface area. 

In addition to the sky-high monthly fee, you’ll have to pay more to get Starlink’s larger premium dish. The antenna, router, and other hardware costs a whopping $2,500 (five times the cost of the base model dish). It’s not just about higher maximum speed, though. The premium dish is more reliable in extreme weather conditions thanks to its bigger surface area. If something does go wrong, the premium tier also includes 24/7 priority support. 

SpaceX has struggled to get the regular antennas in sufficient numbers to keep up with demand. Some of those on the waitlist might be tempted to splurge on the premium tier service, but even that $2,500 deposit doesn’t guarantee instant gratification. The current plan is to start shipping hardware in Q2 2022. Musk notes on Twitter that Starlink can currently only support a limited number of users in each region, so anyone interested in Premium should get on the list early. That may be even more true for these accounts, which will use more bandwidth. 

Starlink might not have these capacity issues in the future. Already, SpaceX has leveraged its reusable Falcon 9 rockets to get more than 2,000 Starlink nodes in orbit. Astronomers are less than pleased to see so many more reflective objects zipping around the night sky, but this is just the start. SpaceX is approved to more than double that number of satellites. Starlink is currently the only game in town — traditional satellite internet services like Viasat are hopelessly outgunned by Starlink, but similar services from Amazon and OneWeb are planned in the next several years.

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